It is the most famous log cabin in American history, and it doesn’t really matter that it floats in the strange region between solid history and make believe.
The visitors’ car park to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace, near Hodgenville, in Kentucky, was quiet on Wednesday afternoon. A few camper vans and retiree couples strolled through the immaculately kept gardens. A young family stood in the cool shade of the Sinking Spring, a sheltered hollow with running water which was refrigerated even in the blazing July sunshine. “This is the place to be,” the Dad said.
Inside the visitors’ centre, the staff were winding down for the day. There was still time to see the cabin, which is stored within a stately stone memorial that sits above the spring where, the woman behind the counter said, “Lincoln probably had his first ever drink of water.”
Who knows what it was like in the winter of Lincoln’s birth year, 1809, but on this sublime afternoon, the little corner where he spent his first few years seemed Elysian. To colleagues and future biographers, Lincoln allowed he had absolutely no memory of Sinking Spring farm: he was just two when the family moved about 10 miles away to Knob Creek. It too, contains a simple, one-room log cabin where Lincoln purportedly spent his boyhood days.
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Lincoln’s presidential years have been so minutely chronicled and dramatised on screen and stage that it is difficult to separate him from the gigantic figure sitting close to the White House on his Memorial chair. It’s easy to forget that he was a child – and that there was nothing inevitable about his rise to achieve what has become, through circumstance as well as the force of his personality, the most famous American presidency.
Few nations chronicle and safeguard their national story through parks and museums and cultivated sites with the religious devotion of the Americans. The information stands outside the Lincoln cabins trace the centuries of tough existence of the great man’s forefathers.
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After Samuel Lincoln landed in Hingham, Massachusetts, from England in 1637, successive generations tumbled further south through the centuries, restlessly moving through New Jersey and Pennsylvania and into the Shenandoah Valley, where Lincoln’s grandfather, also Abraham, sold his farm and took his wife, Bersheba, and five children deeper into unexplored country through the Cumberland Gap and the Kentucky frontier.
In 1786, Abraham was killed in an Indian raid while working the fields from which that tribe had been dispossessed. Family lore maintains that his son Thomas – President Lincoln’s father – was seconds away from death when an older brother intervened with a shotgun.
History – and commerce – moves quickly. By 1894, the Lincoln farm at Sinking Spring had been bought by a New York businessman, AW Bennett. The cabin was dismantled and began its tours of many cities, in the curious company of the childhood log cabin of Jeff Davis, former president of the Confederacy.
One of the quirks of the Bluegrass state is that it was the birthplace of the presidents of both the Union and the Confederacy. After the tour finished and money counted, both cabins were dismantled and the logs chucked away in storage. The 20th century loomed.
In the early 1900s, an interested group, including Mark Twain, managed to buy the cabins and raised enough money to build the stately memorial in which the Lincoln cabin was reassembled and preserved. For decades, visitors could walk around the cabin and believe that they could reach out and touch the source of Lincoln’s earliest years – if they were willing to disobey the warning signs.
Science ended that. There was always something preposterous about the notion that a cabin the Lincolns abandoned in the early 1800s could survive everything, including the tumult of the Civil War. Samples and forensic studies of the ring lines of the logs in both cabins concluded that they had been cut after Lincoln had supposedly lived there. They stand now as symbolic cabins.
But it doesn’t really matter. It’s still a spiritual jolt, driving along 31E, past the high pole signs for your Hardees and your McDonald’s and Motel 6s, to see the simple, brown historical markers pointing motorists to where Lincoln took his first steps, cabin or not.
And what of #47? Has President Donald Trump visited this corner of Kentucky to consider where it all started for Lincoln? Even Trump’s most scathing critics will concede that, for better or worse, he has established himself as one of the most consequential political figures in living memory. He shares with Lincoln the mantle of Republicanism. A Marquette poll for June showed that his approval rating among Republicans remains sky high at 90 per cent. Many of his most devout followers see him as the Lincoln of their day: a once-in-a-century saviour guided by providence.
And what of 100 years’ time? Will the historical markers point towards the Queens childhood home of Donald Trump? Will tourists wander through the gold-tipped rooms of Mar-a-Lago and line up in the foyer of Trump Towers to stand for photographs beside a symbolic reconstruction of the golden escalator?
