Lincoln Birthplace and Boyhood Home
Looking for Lincoln
© Becky Linhardt 2011
Researching a recent article for Ohio Magazine allowed me to revisit my favorite Kentucky Lincoln site, his boyhood home on Knob Creek. This time the cabin restoration was complete – not that it looked finished and it is not the original boyhood home of Abraham Lincoln.
So what makes the Knob Creek cabin, the location special? There are two properties that are managed by the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site. The BIG interpretation center and a temple-like monument that enshrines another cabin (a “symbolic” cabin, not the Lincoln cabin) is south of Hodgenville. I would advise travelers to visit that site first for the information, video, museum and to see the Sinking Springs that gave that Lincoln farm its name. The most recent video, Lincoln: The Kentucky Years, is a quick (15 minute) overview of both properties – well produced and very informative.
Hodgenville has its own Lincoln Museum, a town square with a Lincoln statue, and annual Lincoln events. North of town, US 31E becomes a country road. A well-traveled north-south highway in the past, the heavy traffic is now on I-65 just to the west so you can enjoy a scenic drive through the “knobs” that define the landscape in this part of Kentucky.
The Lincoln Boyhood Home site is not that easy to see so look for a large rambling log building near the road and the National Park sign. Some day the park service hopes to open an interpretive center in the large building that once was a restaurant/inn, built in the early 1900s to capitalize on the Lincoln family connections to the property.
At the north end of the parking lot is the tiny, one-room cabin that was placed at this site to mark where the Lincoln family’s home stood. The cabin on this site was once located back in the valley and has been verified as having belonged to the family of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood friend, Andrew Gollaher, the boy who saved young Lincoln’s life.
Special conservationists were brought in from Virginia to reconstruct the cabin using the same building processes used by thee early pioneers who came to the Knob Creek valley. A few simple possessions true to the time period have been placed within the cabin to show the very rustic nature of their life there.
Farmland spreading back into the peaceful valley behind the cabin has been planted with the type of crops that the Lincoln family would have cultivated: corn, vegetables, herbs, etc. The feeling is peaceful, more evocative of Lincoln’s early rural upbringing so it is easy to feel that you have stepped back in time.
Abraham Lincoln Birthplace NHS
2995 Lincoln Farm Road, Hodgenville, KY 42748 For the monument, museum, and directions to the Boyhood Home site at Knob Creek
270-358-3137 or www.nps.gov/abli
http://www.ohiomagazine.com/Main/Articles/Homage_to_the_Past_4469.aspx