Lincoln's Pennsylvania Roots

You are in Berks County, Pennsylvania, where the Lincoln family put down its earliest American roots. In the early seventeen thirties, Mordecai Lincoln, great-great-grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln, purchased land here and built a stone house that still stands about a mile and a quarter to the south. Mordecai also served as a local justice of the peace and was a friend of the Boone family, kin of the frontier legend Daniel Boone. Years later, Abraham Lincoln himself acknowledged these Pennsylvania ancestors in personal letters, tracing his lineage back to this corner of Berks County long before his family's journey south into Virginia and eventually into Kentucky, where he was born.