Excerpt from Lincoln Birthday Service: Address

In 1816, when Abraham Lincoln was between seven and eight years of age, the family went to Indiana to find there a new home. Here Thomas Lincoln, the father, built a primitive lodge, or what was called by the pioneers a half - faced camp. It was closed on but three sides, the open side being towards the south. It was intended for temporary shelter only, but the Lincolns lived in it for a year. In 1818 Lincoln's mother died. She had borne so much hardship, so much deprivation, and she died in the wide forest, died as the leaf dies, leaving nothing to her son but the memory of her love. Can there be a more pitiful story than that of Thomas Lincoln and his little son, assisted by the relatives, young boys to whom poor Nancy had been kind, hewing out for her __a rude coffin from a rough log, and then laying the pathetic remains away, with no preacher or teacher to make even a brief prayer? It is said that the first letter Abraham Lincoln ever wrote was to a minister, Elder David Elkin, asking him to come and preach a sermon over this poor mother. And the minister did come, months after, and comforted the boy and his sister with the long delayed sermon. The little Sarah was only eleven years old, and the labors of keeping the home were too arduous for her. The next year, 1819, Thomas Lincoln left his little family and went back to Kentucky on a visit. Dennis Hanks. Mr. Lincoln's cousin, quaintly says: We all knowed what Tom went for, but we did not think he would have any luck; he was known to be so shiftless and such a poor provider. But he did have luck, the best of luck, for the widower brought back to the Indiana home a new wife, who was in every way and in everysense a mother to the forlorn little family, and was the means ofbringing some comfort into their lives. Young Abraham loved her dearly and she helped him all she could to get the education for which his soul thirsted; he was a dutiful son to her, as long as he lived.

On March 1, 1830, when Abraham Lincoln was just twenty-one years of age, he, with his father and fam ily, moved to Illinois; so that while Mr. Lincoln was not born in Illinois, he was a citizen of the State dur ing all the years of his manhood. The family settled about ten miles west of Decatur, and here Lincoln helped to clear the ground for a new cabin and fenced the clearing with walnut rails which he helped to split. Some of the rails, perhaps you will remember, were brought into the Decatur convention of 1860, when Mr. Lincoln's name was before the country - not be fore the State Convention - as a probable candidate for the Presidency, and these rails are now historic.

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