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Reaching the Ohio River and crossing to the Indiana shore, Thomas Lincoln hired a wagon which carried his family and their belongings the remaining sixteen miles through the forest to the spot he had chosen a piece of heavily wooded land, one and a half miles east of what has since become the village of Gentryville in Spencer County.
David Turnham, of Gentryville, and was given in 1865 by him to Mr. Herndon, who placed it in the Lincoln Memorial collection of Chicago. In December, 1894, this collection was sold in Philadelphia, and the "Statutes of Indiana" was bought by Mr. William Hoffman Winters, Librarian of the New York Law Institute, and through his courtesy I have been allowed to examine it.
His facility for making rhymes and writing essays was the admiration of many who considered it the more remarkable because "essays and poetry were not taught in school," and "Abe took it up on his own account." A neighbor of Thomas Lincoln, still living near Gentryville. Mr. Brooner's wife was a friend of Nancy Hanks Lincoln.
Sarah his sister was married at Gentryville to one Mr. Grigsby. The Grigsbys were rather great people, as people went in Gentryville. It is said to have become fixed in the boy's mind that the Grigsbys had not treated Sarah well; and this was the beginning of certain woes. Sarah Bush Lincoln, his stepmother, was good to him and he to her.
It is right to say that his culture was not solely political, and that he was able to astonish the natives of Gentryville by explaining that when the sun appeared to set, it "was we did the sinking and not the sun."
It was a type of school building common in the early West, in which many a statesman gained the first rudiments of knowledge. Abraham's first Indiana school was probably held five years before Gentryville was located and a store established there.
He was always reading, scribbling, writing, ciphering, writing poetry, and the like.... In Gentryville, about one mile west of Thomas Lincoln's farm, Lincoln would go and tell his jokes and stories, &c., and was so odd, original and humorous and witty, that all the people in town would gather around him. He would keep them there till midnight.
On the eighteenth of October, 1817, Thomas Lincoln entered a quarter-section of government land eighteen miles north of the Ohio river and about a mile and a half from the present village of Gentryville. About a year later they were followed by the family of Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, relatives of Mrs. Lincoln and old-time neighbors on the Rock Spring farm in Kentucky.
He did not grow up in a literary atmosphere. But in the matter of his official utterances he must be compared with the ablest geniuses and most cultured scholars that have preceded him, and not merely with his early associates. He is to be measured with Washington, the Adamses, Jefferson, and not with the denizens of Gentryville or New Salem.
Our President, the second child, was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin, three miles from Hodgensville, then Hardin, now LaRue County, Kentucky. When little Abraham was seven years old his father moved to Indiana and took up a claim near Gentryville, Spencer County, and built a rude shelter of unhewn logs without a floor, the large opening protected only by hanging skins.
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