Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/34

4 Samuel Lincoln had ten children, one of whom was Mordecai, who was born at Hingham in 1657, and became a blacksmith at Hull, where he married, and in 1704 removed to the neighboring town of Scituate, where he established a furnace for the smelting of ore. He was a man of substance, and in his will bequeathed lands in both Hingham and Scituate, a saw- and grist-mill, iron works, and considerable money; he also made provision for a collegiate education for three grandsons. Of his five children, Mordecai Jr. the eldest removed from Scituate, when his eldest son, John, was born, to Monmouth County, New Jersey, and afterwards to Chester, Penn., and Berks County in Pennsylvania in due succession.

The son, John, had five sons, named respectively John, Thomas, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, together with daughters. In 1758 he removed to the northern part of Augusta County, Virginia, which county was, in 1779, detached and joined to Rockingham County.

The son, Abraham, migrated to the northwest part of North Carolina, to the waters of the Catawba River, where he married Miss Mary Shipley, by whom he had three several sons, named, respectively, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas; and, during or about the year 1780, emigrated with several families of the Berrys and Shipleys to Kentucky, which, though known as "the dark and bloody ground," by reason of the many Indian massacres, was at that time attracting much attention through reports of its extreme fertility made by such explorers as Boone, Newton, and Clark, the explorations of the former commencing in 1769.