New Light On Lincoln's Boyhood

[loetar44]

(05-27-2015 02:39 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Amazing information, Kees, thanks! Joe, I checked Burlingame's "A Life", and he refers to the James LeGrand interview.

Thanks Eva. Here is some more info...

LINCOLN'S COUSIN RECALLS STORIES OF EMANCIPATOR
BY MARTHA MURPHY.

Abe Lincoln's third cousin — and his spittin' image — never even bothers to tell folks who he really is. The cousin, Charles G. Le Grand, has been in the Oak Forest, intirmary for two months, but it took a letter from Ohio yesterday to let even Frank Venecek, uperintendent, and Dr. Eugene Chesrow, head physician, know his identity.

" There never seemed much point in telling anybody about it," Le Grand said yesterday. " Nobody ever believed it anyway. My mother used to spread it around, but when she always talked more than my father."

Le Grand's grandmother, SOPHIE HANKS LE GRAND, lived with Lincoln and the Hanks family UNTIL SHE WAS 19 and the stories she told her grandchildren about Abe are just the kind that helped him get elected president.

Arthur E. Morgan, former president of Antioch college, Yellow Springs, O., and former chairman of the Tennessee valley authority, who wrote the letter to the infirmary urging that every effort be made to enable Le Grand to return home, visited the Le Grands once and heard them all.

" One of grandmother's funniest stories about Lincoln was the one about the corn husking party," Le Grand yesterday. " She made Abe a little corn husk cap to wear and he got to having so much fun at the party that it fell off into the fire. He was pretty mad, but grandmother made him another one.

"Abe and grandmother looked just alike. We laid their pictures side by
side once and grandmother was the spittin' image — even to the mole b his nose and the junny way his lowe lip stuck out."

Le Grand himself looks just like Lincoin — minus the mole. He has the
same jutting chin, long nose and heavy eyebrows and long, rangy build~ The boys back in Jasper, Ark.— the ones that knew about us — used to tease me because they said I ever, walked like him," Le Grand said.

That's where I grew up and where Mr. Morgan came to see us. Father settled there because he liked the hills, the hunting, and the fine spring water. Grandmother lived with us when we had our house in Limestone vallev.

She told us that story about Abe and the Hanks boys all lying in front
of the fireplace nights and studying. Grandmother was quite a figure herself — a mighty deep woman — but they all helped each other. Why she could even work the old Studebaker wagon problem that went around.

"Another of her stories was about the time she and Abe were out hoeing corn and a sluggard walked by all dressed up in a new pair of pants. They were working hard and the sluggard never did anything. Abe made some remark about him and got slapped right off the rail fence they were resting on."

Le Grand reads every book about Lincoln he can lay hands on, but has never visited any of the Lincoln shrines. He's 61 years old now and recovering from hip fractures and figures he probably won't get a chance to make the trips.

All he wants is a chance to go back to his kin folks in Doe Run, Mo.

Source: Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection.
URL: https://archive.org/details/hanksfamilylinc_9