Humble Beginnings

I was born, and have ever remained, in the most humble walks of life.

~Abraham Lincoln

It all started in Arco, Idaho in 2002.  I was in the gift shop at Craters of the Moon National Monument amassing a pile of postcards when I spotted it out of the corner of my eye.  Oh sure, I knew there were national parks in the United States, but until I began to thumb through the pages of the spiral-bound Passport to Your National Parks, I really had no idea of how extensive our National Park Service was.

Yellowstone National Park was established as our nation’s first by an Act signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872; the NPS was created some 44 years later when President Woodrow Wilson signed another in August 1916.  Today the NPS is compromised of 395 units which cover more than 84 million acres in every state (except Delaware!), the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  They not only preserve the scenic areas of our country, but also share the stories of its people in national parks, monuments, battlefields, military parks, historical parks and sites, lakeshores, seashores, recreation areas, scenic rivers and trails, and the White House.  Whew!  Suddenly there were a lot more places I wanted to see. 

With color-coded maps, pictures and descriptions of a variety of regions, the NPS Passport points me in the direction of its assorted sites.  And, like an international passport, it provides a place to collect cancellation stamps bearing the names and dates of the places to which I’ve been.  In addition to accomplishing things on my Bucket List while traveling, one of my idiosyncrasies became a desire (obsession?) to obtain a stamp in my NPS Passport from whatever happened to be in the area I was visiting.  Five such sites can be found in Kentucky, two of which were in the vicinity of where we’d be.  Let’s roll!

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park was the first memorial built to honor our 16th President.  That’s right, Lincoln hailed from Kentucky.  Even though he ultimately wound up in Illinois, the Bluegrass State was home to his humble beginnings.  Compromised of two units, this park focuses on Lincoln’s life in the south.  The Birthplace Unit features a symbolic cabin enshrined within a memorial building and the Boyhood Home Unit where Lincoln spent his formative years.  Since we were traveling from the north, we actually stopped at the latter first, but for the sake of chronology I’ll detail the sites in reverse.

At the Visitor Center at the Birthplace Unit we viewed a 15-minute film, Abraham Lincoln: The Kentucky Years, to discover where it all started. 

In the fall of 1808, Thomas and Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln and their year-old daughter Sarah settled at Sinking Spring farm in what is today known as Hodgenville, Kentucky. 

Two months later, on February 12, 1809, Nancy gave birth to their second child in a one-room log cabin.  He was named Abraham after his grandfather. 

Due to an unstable land title, in 1811 the family moved 10 miles northeast and rented 30 acres of the Knob Creek farm.  Lincoln’s earliest memory was of this homestead and helping his father plant pumpkin seeds. 

The reconstructed cabin at this site actually belonged to the Gollaher family. 

Had it not been for his childhood friend Austin Gollaher, who plucked Lincoln from a swollen stream following a flash flood, the great man’s story would have ended here.  But he and his family remained at Knob Creek for five more years until slavery issues and lawsuits over title to Sinking Spring farm led them to Indiana. 

In 1905 Robert Collier purchased the farm where Lincoln was born. Together with Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, Samuel Gompers and others, he formed the Lincoln Farm Association to preserve the birthplace and establish a memorial to house a log cabin from the farm; they raised over $350,000 from 100,000 citizens.  John Russell Pope, known for other famous structures such as the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., designed the Beaux-Arts neo-classical building at Lincoln’s birthplace.  The cornerstone was laid by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 and dedicated by President William Howard Taft in 1911, almost 100 years after the Lincoln family moved from Sinking Spring farm. 

Fifty-six granite steps—one for each year of Lincoln’s life—lead to the log cabin inside the building.  While it is old and typical to the area of that time, it is not the original Lincoln cabin.  The memorial building also features 16 windows, 16 rosettes on the ceiling, and 16 fence poles, all representative of Lincoln as our 16th President. 

Having previously toured the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana and the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Illinois, I knew how Lincoln’s story ended.  With our visit to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park, I finally learned how his story began.  After I scored a stamp from each site in my NPS Passport, it was time for discoveries of another kind …