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Updated: July 11, 2025
His handwriting, his arithmetic, and his general intelligence were so good that he had occasionally been employed to help in the Gentryville store, and Gentry thus knew by personal test that he was entirely capable of assisting his son Allen in the trading expedition to New Orleans. For Abraham, on the other hand, it was an event which must have opened up wide vistas of future hope and ambition.
If the settler chose his farm wisely, others would soon settle near by, and when a cluster of clearings had been made, some enterprising speculator would appear, take up a quarter section, cut it into town lots, and call the place after himself, as Piketown, or Leesburg, or Gentryville.
Having reached the Ohio and crossed to where he had left his goods on the Indiana side, he hired a wagon, which carried them and his family the remaining sixteen miles through the forest to the spot he had chosen, which in due time became the Lincoln farm. It was a piece of heavily timbered land, one and a half miles east of what has since become the village of Gentryville, in Spencer County.
The nights Lincoln spent in Gentryville lying on the floor in front of the fire figuring on the fire-shovel, the hours he passed in poring over the Statutes of Indiana, the days he wrestled with Kirkham's Grammar, alone made the mastery of Flint and Gibson possible. His struggle with Flint and Gibson made easier the volumes he borrowed from Major Stuart's law library.
The institution of slavery, which lived on the toil of the black man, threw a dark shadow across the path of the "poor white" who could claim no title to property in human flesh and sinew, and in 1817 he removed from Kentucky to Spencer County, Ind., and settled in the forest at Pigeon Creek, near the town of Gentryville. On October 5, 1818, Mrs.
Her faith in him was still shining in her eyes as she looked up at him and tried to smile. He gave her a quick hug and hurried down the path. It was a long, long walk to New Salem, where Abe arrived on a hot summer day in 1831. This village, on a high bluff overlooking the Sangamon River, was bigger than Gentryville, bigger even than Rockport.
In March, 1828, Lincoln was employed by one of the leading men of Gentryville to take a load of produce down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. For this service he was paid eight dollars a month and his rations. This visit to New Orleans was a great event in his life. It showed him the life of a busy cosmopolitan city, which was a perfect wonderland to him.
He continued for years to be a very poor man, harassed by debts he was constantly laboring to pay, and sometimes absolutely without money: but from this time on he met and worked with men of wider knowledge and better-trained minds than those he had known in Gentryville and New Salem, while the simple social life of Vandalia, where he went to attend the sessions of the legislature, was more elegant than anything he had yet seen.
So, once more the little family "pulled up stakes" and moved on to the place selected by the father in Spencer County, about a mile and a half from Gentryville. It was a long, toilsome journey through the forest, from the old home in Kentucky to the new one in Indiana. In some places they had to clear their way through the tangled thickets as they journeyed along.
Breadstuff could be had only by sending young Abraham, on horseback, seven miles, with a bag of corn to be ground on a hand grist-mill. In the course of two or three years a road from Corydon to Evansville was laid out, running past the Lincoln farm; and perhaps two or three years afterward another from Rockport to Bloomington crossing the former. This gave rise to Gentryville.
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