Thomas Lincoln and the Nelson County Roots
Near Bardstown, Kentucky
Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, and that much is widely known. Less known is how deep his family's roots were in this specific corner of the state. Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father, grew up in what was then Nelson County, in the area that became Washington County after a boundary adjustment in the seventeen nineties.
The Lincoln family had moved to Kentucky in the early seventeen eighties, and by the late seventeen eighties Thomas's mother had settled the family on Beech Fork, not long after the town of Bardstown itself was established. Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter's trade in the region, working on farms and houses throughout Nelson and surrounding counties. On June twelfth, eighteen oh six, Thomas married Nancy Hanks in a ceremony at Beechland in Washington County, just over the county line from Bardstown.
Three years later, on February twelfth, eighteen oh nine, Abraham Lincoln was born at Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County, a few dozen miles southwest of here. Thomas Lincoln continued farming and working in the region before moving his family to Indiana in eighteen sixteen. The connection between this neighborhood of Kentucky and the sixteenth president of the United States is not incidental.
The Lincoln family was of the same world as Bardstown: frontier Kentucky, limestone farmland, the edge of the American republic pushing west. The man who would hold the Union together was shaped by this particular ground.
