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Thomas Herring Lincoln (January 6, 1778 in Rockingham County, Virginia, United States – January 17, 1851 in Coles County, Illinois, United States) was an American pioneer farmer and father of Abraham Lincoln.
Birth
He was the fifth child of Abraham Lincoln Sr. (1744-1786) of Amity, Pennsylvania and Bathsheba Herring. The other siblings were: Elizabeth Lincoln; Mordecai (1771-?); Mary Lincoln (c1773-?) who was born in Rockingham, Virginia; Josiah Lincoln (1776-?) who was born on July 10, 1776 in Virginia; and Nancy Lincoln (1780-?) or Ann Lincoln who was born on March 25, 1780 in Linville Creek, Virginia.
Early life
Thomas Lincoln moved to the state of Kentucky in the 1780s with his family. In May 1786, Thomas witnessed the murder of his father by Indians "…when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest." That fall, his mother moved the family to Washington County, Kentucky (near Springfield), where Thomas lived until the age of eighteen. From 1795 to 1802, Thomas held a variety of jobs in several locations. These jobs increased his earning power and helped to feed the Lincoln family.
Marriage and family
In 1802 he moved to Hardin County, Kentucky, where one year later, he purchased a 238-acre farm. Four years later, on June 12, 1806, he married Nancy Hanks. Their first child, a daughter named Sarah Lincoln, was born a year later. In 1808, Thomas bought a 300-acre farm in Nolin Creek, Kentucky. There on February 12, 1809, his son Abraham was born. A third child, Thomas, Jr., died in infancy.
Thomas was active in community and church affairs in Hardin County. He served as a jury member, a petitioner for a road, and as a guard for county prisoners. He could read a little, was a skilled carpenter, and was a property owner. However, like dozens of others, Thomas fell victim to land laws widely described as chaotic. On three separate occasions, defective titles caused him to lose his farm. Discouraged by these setbacks, he decided to move his family to Indiana where the land ordinance of 1785 ensured that land once purchased and paid for was retained. Abraham Lincoln claimed many years later that his father’s move from Kentucky to Indiana was "partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty of land titles in Kentucky."
In December 1816, the Lincolns settled near Little Pigeon Creek where Thomas and Abraham set to work carving a home from the Indiana wilderness. Father and son worked side by side to clear the land, plant the crops and build a home. Thomas also found that his skills as a carpenter were in demand as the community grew.
In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln contracted the dreaded milk sickness by drinking poisoned milk of a cow that had eaten the White Snakeroot plant. There was no cure for the disease and on October 5, 1818, Nancy died. For over a year, Thomas and his children lived alone, until December 2, 1819, when he married Sarah Lincoln, a widow from Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Sarah and her three children – Elizabeth, Matilda, and John – joined Abraham, Sarah and Dennis Hanks (a cousin of Nancy’s who had lived with the Sparrows until their death from the same outbreak of milk sickness that had killed Nancy) to make a new family of eight.
In addition to working as a carpenter, managing a farm, and looking after his family, Thomas also assisted in building the Little Pigeon Baptist Church, where he was a member and served as church trustee. By 1827, he had earned enough money to pay his debt on 100 acres of land.
Despite his success in Indiana, Thomas decided to move his family to Illinois in 1830. John Johnston, his stepson, who was by then an adult, moved there and sent glowing reports of the fertile ground that was available. In addition, because it was prairie, there was no need for the backbreaking work of clearing the land. Thomas sold his Indiana land and moved first to Macon County, Illinois and eventually to Coles County in 1821. The homestead site on Goosenest Prairie, about 10 miles south of Charleston, Illinois, is preserved as the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site, although his original saddlebag log cabin was lost after being disassembled and shipped to Chicago for display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. His son Abraham left to start his own homestead at New Salem, Illinois during the family’s move to Coles County. Thomas Lincoln remained a resident of the county for the rest of his life and is buried at nearby Shiloh Cemetery. *
Sources
- This article incorporates text from *, a work of the National Park Service and as such in the public domain.
External links
1778 births | 1851 deaths | Abraham Lincoln | Welsh-Americans
"Thomas Lincoln"