On Feb. 12, his Bluegrass birthplace will take part in the 2008-2010 Lincoln bicentennial with a presidential event at the imposing Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in Hodgenville, about 60 miles south of Louisville. The neoclassical temple enfolds a cabin symbolic of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln’s when they settled on the Sinking Spring Farm in December 1808 and greeted a baby boy two months later on Feb. 12.
President Bush is expected to speak and plant a commemorative tree; his predecessors are invited, too. The former chief executives will be in good company: Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all made their pilgrimages to Hodgenville. With Presidents Day coming up Feb. 18, perhaps you should plan a visit as well.
The Feb. 12 events will include a cornet band playing Civil War-period music and an ensemble singing spirituals. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” is set to speak, and actor Sam Waterston will read from one of Lincoln’s speeches.
The stone temple, atop 56 granite steps %26mdash; one for every year of Lincoln’s life %26mdash; strikes many people as incongruous with the simplicity of the man and his origins, especially when they go inside and see a cabin of hand-hewn logs and hand-mixed chinking.
“You have to remember that this was one of the first memorials to Lincoln,” said Sandy Brue, chief of interpretation and resource management at the birthplace. “It was built in an era of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Movement %26mdash; Roosevelt idolized Lincoln %26mdash; and the rise of America as a world power.”
John Russell Pope, who designed the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, began work on Lincoln’s birthplace memorial in 1907. President Taft dedicated the building on Nov. 9, 1911.
For the bicentennial, the National Park Service has repainted the memorial’s exterior, replaced the split-rail fence, remodeled the visitor center and planted redbud and serviceberry trees on the 116-acre property. Managers also added American chestnut trees, which families such as the Lincolns relied upon for food and shelter.
“This was a farm when the Lincolns were here, and people arrive and ask ‘Where’s the homestead?’ They don’t expect to see a formal memorial.”
But climb the steps and you’ll get at least a sense of the hardscrabble life that the Lincolns embarked upon when they paid $200 cash for the 348-acre Sinking Spring Farm. The symbolic birth cabin, which the science of dendrochronology has dated no earlier than 1848, reflects their rigorous life on the frontier: one room with a dirt floor and windows that would have been covered by greased paper or animal skins.
It was in such a cabin that Nancy Hanks Lincoln bore her son Abraham on a cold Sunday in 1809. The lad, named for his paternal grandfather, was the seventh generation of Lincolns born in the New World. Since Samuel Lincoln left England for Massachusetts in 1637, not one generation was born and died in the same place.
Abraham would become the first president born outside the original Colonies.
Dennis Hanks, Lincoln’s cousin, described visiting mother and child the morning after Lincoln was born. “Nancy was layin’ thar in a pole bed lookin’ purty happy. Tom’d built up a good fire and throwed a b’ar skin over the kivers to keep ‘em warm.”
The birthplace museum spotlights the Lincoln family Bible, in which Abraham recorded his own birth; it was the first book he remembered seeing. The Bible remained in the family until the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, when it was sold for $125. Later, the government acquired it for the nation.
A voracious reader and self-taught lawyer, Lincoln would relish one of the bicentennial initiatives at his namesake museum, a few miles away on the town square in Hodgenville.
The storefront Lincoln Museum will add a Lincoln Library, for “casual readers and researchers,” said director Iris LaRue. “We’ve already had two private collections donated.”
The homespun museum centers around a dozen dioramas from Lincoln’s life, from his birth to his assassination at Ford’s Theater. One of the museum’s most engaging spots is the Lincoln art gallery. Each October, artists compete in a juried show, and the best pieces are purchased for the museum.
In front of the building, near a Lincoln statue from the centennial celebration of 1909, the museum will unveil a statue of Lincoln at 7, his age when the family left for Indiana.
“Psychologists and sociologists say that a child’s character is pretty much formed by 7 or 8,” LaRue said, “so the time Lincoln spent here is extremely important to his development. One of the principal efforts of the Kentucky Lincoln bicentennial is to educate the public that he was born in Kentucky. He said, ‘I, too, am a Kentuckian.’”
Every Lincoln site in the region is caught up in bicentennial buzz. At the Lincoln Homestead State Park in Springfield, the cabin of Lincoln’s favorite uncle, Mordecai, is being renovated. The open-air museum has the original Francis Berry home, where Thomas Lincoln courted Nancy Hanks, and legend says he proposed to her in front of the fireplace. The park also has a log replica of Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother’s cabin and of a blacksmith shop where his father learned his trade in smithing and carpentry.
The Kentucky History Center in Frankfort will spotlight personal artifacts, such as Lincoln’s pocket watch, in a major exhibit, “Beyond the Log Cabin: Abraham Lincoln and Kentucky.”
Farmington Historic Home in Louisville, where Lincoln visited his “most intimate friend” Joshua Speed for three weeks in 1841, will explore “The Speeds, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War %26mdash; One Louisville Family’s Story” in a new exhibit.
Romantics will want to swing by Lexington’s Mary Todd Lincoln House. She and Lincoln met and married in Springfield, Ill., but visited the Todds several times, including a three-week stay in 1847 as the family headed to Washington for Lincoln’s Congressional term. Curators have polished the silver candelabra used in the White House and arranged Mary’s mourning clothes in her girlhood home, among America’s first historic sites restored to honor a first lady.
In May, curators at the Mary Todd Lincoln House will sponsor Civil War walking tours in the Lexington Cemetery.
Amid all this Lincoln frenzy, there is one pivotal spot unready for its bicentennial close-up. “My earliest recollection, however,” Lincoln wrote in a letter dated June 4, 1860, “is of the Knob Creek place.”
The future president was 2 when the family moved 10 miles northeast of his birthplace to this frontier farm, now called the Lincoln Boyhood Home at Knob Creek.
On fields flanking the route from Louisville to Nashville, Lincoln planted pumpkin seeds %26mdash; later washed away by flood %26mdash; walked to school with his older sister, Sarah, and nearly drowned in Knob Creek until his pal Austin Gollaher plucked him out. Young Lincoln watched shackled slaves driven to market along the dusty road.
The National Park Service took over Knob Creek in 2001. It’s busy analyzing the reconstructed boyhood cabin, now in sagging decay. It won’t be ready for the Kentucky Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008-2010, but park officials hope to unveil the rejuvenated 228-acre farm for another momentous date in American history: 2011, the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War.
IF YOU GO
Getting there
Kentucky’s key Lincoln sites are south and southeast of Louisville. Farmington Historic Home is on the south side of Louisville. Expect to pay $300 or more round trip airfare from Atlanta to Louisville. The city is about 420 miles, or a 6 1/2-hour drive, from downtown Atlanta.
Where to stay
%26#8226; Dupont Mansion, 1317 S. Fourth St., Louisville. An Italianate mansion in Old Louisville, circa 1879. Doubles from $119. 502-638-0045, www.dupontmansion.com .
%26#8226; Historic Maple Hill Manor, 2941 Perryville Road, U.S. 150 E., Springfield. Doubles from $109. Abraham Lincoln Library bedroom rates start at $129. 1-800-886-7546, www.maplehillmanor.com.
%26#8226; 1888 Historic Rocking Horse Manor, 1022 S. Third St., Louisville. A Richardsonian Romanesque mansion in Old Louisville. Doubles from $105. 502-583-0408, www.rockinghorse-bb.com.
%26#8226; Holiday Inn Express Hotel %26 Suites, I-65 Exit 94, 107 Buffalo Creek Drive, Elizabethtown. Jacuzzi rooms, high-speed Internet access, indoor pool, free breakfast. Doubles from $99. 270-769-1334, www.ichotelsgroup.com.
%26#8226; Fairfield Inn %26 Suites, I-65 Exit 94, 1031 Executive Drive, Elizabethtown. Whirlpool suites, indoor pool and whirlpool, continental breakfast. Doubles from $89. 270-769-1440, www.marriott.com.
%26#8226; Old Talbott Tavern, Court Square, 107 W. Stephen Foster Ave., Bardstown. Built in 1779, the tavern is considered the oldest Western stagecoach stop in America. Abraham Lincoln stayed here, as well as Jesse James and Gen. George Patton. Doubles from $70. 1-800-482-8376.
Information
%26#8226; Kentucky Lincoln Bicentennial: 502-564-1792, www.kylincoln.org
%26#8226; National Lincoln Bicentennial: 202-707-6998
%26#8226; Kentucky: www.kentuckytourism.com
%26#8226; Louisville: www.gotolouisville.com .
Betsa Marsh, author of “The Eccentric Traveler: A World of Curious Adventures,” is a winner of the Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers.
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