History
Abraham Lincoln's birth mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died in 1818 while the family lived in southern Indiana. In 1819, Lincoln's father Thomas Lincoln married Sarah Bush Lincoln of Kentucky. In 1830, Thomas and Sarah's newly combined family migrated west from Indiana into central Illinois.
After a wretched winter in 1830-1831 at a campsite west of Decatur, young Abraham, now an adult, left the family to start his own homestead and seek his fortune in Sangamon County. Wandering generally southeastward, Thomas and Sarah eventually settled in Coles County. After living unsuccessfully on three separate farmsteads within the county, Thomas bought a small plot near the Embarras River in 1840, part of what was then called Goosenest Prairie, now within Pleasant Grove Township on the southern edge of Coles County.
At some point soon after that purchase, Thomas and Sarah built what was to be their final home, a saddlebag cabin with two main rooms and additional sleeping and storage space in a loft or attic accessed by a ladder. By 1845, the cabin was home to as many as 18 members of the Lincoln and Johnston families, living together in an extended-family arrangement common in Appalachian Southern culture. Abraham Lincoln, now a rising state legislator and lawyer, provided financial help to his parents but did not visit them as often as he could. As a lawyer, he was in Charleston, site of the Coles County courthouse, quite frequently, but only visited "every year or two." Though he remembered his stepmother fondly, Lincoln was not very close to his father; he did not visit even when Thomas Lincoln was terminally ill in 1851.
At the end of January 1861, Abraham Lincoln, the President-elect, traveled by newly laid railroad tracks from Springfield to Farmington, a few miles north of the cabin, to visit his widowed stepmother (Farmington is now the unincorporated hamlet of Campbell and not to be confused with Farmington, Illinois). Their meeting occurred at the middle-class frame house of prominent Farmington citizen (and Sarah's son-in-law) Reuben Moore. They also visited Thomas Lincoln's grave at nearby Shiloh Cemetery. Sarah was fond of her stepson and had always believed he would be successful. This was to be their last visit; Lincoln never returned to Illinois alive.
Sarah Bush Lincoln lived in the Goosenest Prairie cabin until her death in 1869. Sarah Lincoln was buried with Thomas in Shiloh Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site
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