Here's a link to an excellent photo-essay of the history of the Lincoln neighborhood in Springfield, Illinois. I learned very much and found it facsinating.
Went to an estate auction here in town. Found a bargain. I bid on and won a 10 X 13 inch sepia tone coloage of the Lincoln homes and won for only $2. It was produced in 1924 and sold at Lincoln Post Card & Photos, J. C. Shull, 2158 14th St., Springfield, ILL. As you look closely, there is one home in Kentucky, one in Indiana, one in New Salem and two in Illinois. Shouldn't it be two in Kentucky, one in Indiana, One in New Salem, and only one home in Springfield? See attached image. You would think Illinois would have this correct!
Rick Brown
HistoryReference.org
A Nonprofit Organization
"Not everything you read on the Internet is true." Abraham Lincoln
Who was Nancy Hanks, mother of President Lincoln? If we believe vicious and unclear fabrications and slanders, tradition, and gossip, if we don’t rule out mixture of memory, and if we rely on information found in books, magazines, newspapers, family correspondence, accurate or not, than Abraham Lincoln must have had more “mothers” than any other human who ever lived.
Past weeks I spent some time reading various books and literature, relating to Nancy’s parentage, I surfed the Internet and compiled a chart (sort of flow chart), in which “ten mothers” of Lincoln are shown. It took me some time to compile the Dutch version, but to make an English version of the chart was easy (only some minor translations needed). The “explanatory text” (a lengthy paper, in which I have described why a certain “route” is more false than another) unfortunately is in Dutch.
Maybe you are interested in the chart to pick a mother by simply using your expertise or imagination to try to figure out which mother is most likely Lincoln’s or not. Or maybe your conclusion is simple by saying, that it is impossible to trace accurately the ancestral line of Abraham Lincoln’s mother.
Please feel free to give me any feedback. Do you see mistakes, faults? Do you have additions? Any comment will be greatly welcomed and highly appreciated!
Please let me know if you also want the (rough) Dutch “explanatory text” (maybe you can read it by using google translate), by sending me a private email message.
I did not misspell the title of this thread. I plagarized it from the title of a nice article that ran in the February 2015 issue of the Boy Scout magazine, Guideposts.
I believe that we have discussed food historian, Rae Katherine Eighmey's book on Lincoln's food habits and recipes before; and this is a scaled down version of that. Here are a few tidbits from the article:
1. In 1831, Lincoln "took a little trip down the mighty Miss-a-sip" (remember that little ditty?) with cousin John Hanks. Hanks later referenced that their meals had to be simple, cooked from inexpensive ingredients that were easy to bring along or pick up as they traveled -- cornmeal cakes, catfish, and hearty sour-milk biscuits. The author found a recipe for the latter and fixed a batch, which she describes as "dense...would sustain the pilot and crew on their river voyage."
2. In 1832, Lincoln was a volunteer in the Illinois Militia during the short-lived Black Hawk War. A fellow volunteer wrote about the company's meals. "We ground our coffee in the same tin cup with the hatchet handle - baked our bread on our ramroads around the same fire - ate our fried meat off the same piece of elm bark."
One day, the company ran out of rations and the troops went foraging. In an abandonned barn, they found some scrawny chickens and a hog jowl. Lincoln and the others thought to cook the chickens over the fire with the hog-jowl drippings.
3. The author also reminds us that the young Lincoln lawyer and father was often seen in Springfield's markets with a basket on one arm and a boy on the other. Neighbors also recalled seeing him out in the yard chopping firewood.
4. Also described is the unique way that Lincoln pared and ate apples - at least according to Herndon. I believe this has been posted before on this forum.
5. The article ends with the recipe for an almond pound cake similar to ones that Mary Lincoln may have prepared. I love good pound cakes, but this recipe will have to wait until fall or winter when my oven dares to be turned on again (not in 90-degree weather!).
1/2 cup of salted butter at room temperature
1/2 cup of sugar
3 large eggs
1/4 tsp ground mace
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 tsp grated lemon zest
1 Tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
4 ozs blanched slivered almonds finely crushed or chopped
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white wine
Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour 8 1/2x4 1/2 loaf pan. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in mace, almond extract, lemon zest and juice, and crushed almonds. Stir in half of the flour, followed by wine and then remaining flour, mixing well after each addition. Spoon batter into pan. Bake until lightly browned and knife inserted in center comes out clean - 40-50 minutes. Makes 10-12 slices.
For a presentation, I was looking at the entry for the Lincoln family in the 1860 census. I was wondering who "Philip Dinkell" was and found this interesting blog:
J.L. Hanks is James Lewis Hanks born Feb. 14, 1829 in Illinois, died in Douglas County, Oregon, Aug. 13, 1917, son of John “The Railsplitter” Hanks. The article says: “His father, John Hanks, assisted Lincoln in building the young lawyer’s first cabin in Illinois and they engaged in steamboating together. They made 12 trips down the Mississippi river to New Orleans and other points”. And: “My father assisted him in building a cabin on the place”. The article also says: “He (= J.L. Hanks) was about 12 years old when Abraham Lincoln came to his father’s (= John “The Railsplitter” Hanks) to live and remembers him well. He and Lincoln shared the same bed for a long time”. J. L. Hanks “about 12 years old” means ca. 1841. And the article says: “It was while he was at our house that he began reading law. He borrowed law books from a lawyer at the nearest town ….”
I’m puzzling. I always thought that Lincoln moved to Springfield In the spring of 1837, after having accepted Stuart’s offer to become his junior law partner. I always thought that Lincoln only made two flat boat trips to New Orleans, in 1828 and 1831, not 12. I always thought that John “The Raiulsplitter”Hanks only assisted in building a log cabin in March 1830 when the Lincolns arrived in Macon County, Illinois. J.L. Hanks was 1 year old then. How could he remember that?
I found this in the second paragraph interesting,
"The family of Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham Lincoln, while in their Indiana home, consisted of his two children, Abraham and Sarah, and a flock of orphaned or partly orphaned , children from four different families. Among these was a niece, Sophie Hanks, just a month younger than Abraham, who lived in the family of Thomas Lincoln until she was married."
This was new to me. It also seems the author did not think highly of Dennis Hanks.
After that first page, I found sections 3 and 4 of the article the most interesting.
Admitting my tendency to psychoanlyze, I nevertheless thought it would be interesting to speculate about whom was the single most influential person in forming Lincoln's character and outlook.
Obvious candidates would be Nancy and Thomas, Mary, Ann Rutledge, his stepmother Sarah, and even Shakespeare.
My sense is that it was Nancy Hanks Lincoln. His statements to Herndon suggest that he thought that his intelligence came from her side of his family, implying perhaps that Thomas was the less impressive parent. Her early death gave him a tragic, fatalisitic view of life, marked by a dificulty in accepting the "cheap grace" of organized religion. It does not seem that Thomas was a particulary sentimental or affectionate parent (even by the standards of the day) so Nancy's death may have exposed Abraham and his sister to a harsher childhood than if she had lived. This may have made him even more inclined to care about the weak than he was already naturally inclined.
In my limited observed experience, it seems that people who lose a mother early on are particularly impacted by the loss. A sensitive person like Lincoln would have been deeply affected.
There is the old saw that people tend to marry someone who reminds them of their distaff parent. Mary Lincoln does not support that theory; she, in fact, suggests the antithesis of the little we know about Nancy.
A very charming anecdote that says so much about the man is the story of Lincoln riding a horse on the lawyer circuit and noticing, on a rainy, cold day, a pig that had gotten stuck on the wayside. He knew that, if he stopped to pull the pig out of the ditch, he would be a muddy mess by the time he got to court. So he rode on. But the pig's plight kept eating at him. He turned his horse around and saved the pig (sadly for probably an equally grim end).
Lincoln had the remarkable self-knowledge to know that he had turned around as much for himself as for the pig. He knew that, if he did not effect the rescue, the matter would gnaw at him ad infinitum. So, he did not congratulate himself on his kindness, and simply recognized he had done the best for himself--and for the soon-to-be bacon.
One-hundred sixty years later or so, neurologists are studying "mirror neurons" contained in the cells of the frontal lobe. Some posit that a super-abundance of these makes people hyper-sensitive to the suffering of others; and, conversly, a deficit would result in the kind of person who could do nasty things to others without a second look. If this be the case, it speaks to the heroic efforts that Lincoln made to conduct a war that must have devastated him emotionally.
Can anybody tell me the exact location of where the Globe Tavern would have been and where "Aristocracy Hill" is located in Springfield today? thank you.
