Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/50

20 sketches of his life, says he was born in Hardin County. It is a trait common to all men to be interested in the place of their birth, and therefore there is every reason to believe that the President knew his own birthplace. He had reached the age of clear mind and sound memory before his mother died, and it is most unbelievable that he would have received any confusing instruction on this point from her. Moreover, his stepmother was an intimate friend of his own mother at the time of his birth, and she lived until long after he had reached manhood, and in all these years she supported the mother's story of his birth. This ought to be authority enough for any biographer. Indeed, no biographer has so far ventured to set up a counter claim. But in spite of this authority and that of more than one hundred copyrighted biographies of President Lincoln, there are still a few people in Washington County, Kentucky, who claim that Abraham, the second child of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, was born in that county. It is a matter of record that the first child—Sarah—was born in Elizabethtown, which is in Hardin County, and that Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln moved from there to the farm near Hodgenville, then also in Hardin County, and now in LaRue County, where Lincoln, his mother, and his stepmother all claimed he was born, and where a second son, named William Brumfield Lincoln after his uncle Brumfield, probably began his short life, which ended at the age of four or five years. In the summer of 1906, the founders of the Lincoln Farm Association, a patriotic body organized to preserve the Lincoln birthplace farm as a national park, made a thorough investigation of the Washington County claims. Their lawyers found in all that county but four people who claimed to have any knowledge of the matter, and each of these stated upon oath that his belief arose from the statement made some twenty years before by an old citizen over ninety years of age, (who had made no assertions as to Lincoln's birthplace until his memory had become frail through age,) that as a youth he had seen Nancy Hanks Lincoln in Washington County with a babe in her arms whom he supposed to be Abraham Lincoln.—M. M. M.