Abraham Lincoln

For those of you who may be wondering, no, I do not intend to leave my narrative of our trip to the Pacific Northwest stuck out at McKenzie Pass Oregon, as magnificent as that scenery was. I will get us back. But too much else is happening right now. For example:

A. Lincoln in Kentucky

This February 12, 2009, starts a year long celebration of the 200th Birthday of our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. In honor of this event, I too wish to start where Lincoln did, in Kentucky. While Kentucky has many places that honor the memory of Lincoln and his family, for they were, after all, from Kentucky, three stand out in my mind.

The first, and most obvious place, is the farm where he was born, “Sinking Creek” Farm. Visitors there today will find an immense Neo-Classical Marble structure covering a “symbolic birth cabin.” The reality of the situation was that by the time the nation got around to honoring the nativity of Lincoln, the cabin of his birth had long since rotted away, that being the nature of structures composed of untreated logs erected in a place of dampness such as the vicinity of a sinking creek. And so, those eminent-thinking Victorians who developed the site erected what they considered a fitting memorial, and placed within it the next best thing to his nativity, a cabin they found on a neighboring place.

The second place, and just a few short miles down the road, is the farm where Lincoln and his family moved when he was a young boy, Knob Creek Farm. Here too, the actual cabin where Lincoln lived with his family had disappeared into that moist soft loam that untreated log cabins sink into by the time the restoration folks came around. And so materials from another cabin, again a neighboring cabin this time one of Lincoln’s boyhood friends, was used in a restoration of the Knob Creek Farm Cabin.

The third, and for me the most meaningful, place is the Talbott Tavern in Bardstown KY. This building, still largely the same as it was back in the early 1800’s (despite a fire during the 1990’s) is reputed to be the “oldest stage coach stop in America.” It also became the home for the young Abraham Lincoln and his family when they were evicted from “their” Knob Creek Farm after losing a Land Title dispute (early frontier Kentucky was notorious for Land Title Disputes and many both the famous, Daniel Boone, and otherwise, found themselves thrown off “their land” from time to time).

Lincoln and his mother and sister stayed at Talbott Tavern while his father crossed the Ohio River to enter the newer frontier of Indiana in search of a new non-disputable place for the family to live. Lincoln’s days in this Tavern weren’t too long in time, as time goes in one who lived as eventful a life as Lincoln. But, the fact of the matter was, and is, that during these formative years of his life, for a while, A. Lincoln, later the 16th President of the United States, was, in modern-day terms:

“HOMELESS.”

But after Kentucky there was Indiana, then later Illinois, and still later, the fame of the world.

Happy 200th birthday President Lincoln.