JOHN BANKS' CIVIL WAR BLOG: 'Life of an ox': Where Abraham Lincoln lived ages 2 through 7

Knob Creek Farm, near Hodgenville, Ky.

Like this blog on Facebook | Follow me on Twitter

Steep, heavily wooded hills — “knobs” — rise on each side of the Knob Creek farm where Abe Lincoln lived from ages 2 to 7. On a frosty, deep-blue sky morning, I visited the secluded site for a story for The History Channel. What a beautiful spot. But life was difficult here near Hodgenville, Ky., for the Lincolns, as it was for all frontier families.

Gravestone of Abe Lincoln's brother,
Thomas, who died in infancy.
The marker is in the visitors' center
at Lincoln's birthplace in Hodgenville, Ky.

“Life on the frontier was little better than the life of an ox,” Lincoln historian Michael Burlingame told me. But the Lincolns, he says, were especially poor.

The family — Abraham, father Thomas, mother Nancy and sister Sarah — lived in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor, On the farm's wide fields, Lincoln’s father planted corn and pumpkins.

In front of the Lincolns’ door, on the road from Louisville to Nashville, the world passed: pioneers with heavily laden wagons, peddlers, slaves, local politicians, missionaries and soldiers returning from the War of 1812.

In rain-swollen Knob Creek in 1816, a Lincoln playmate may have saved Abraham from drowning. That story bears more scrutiny. In 1812, Lincoln’s infant brother Thomas died on the farm.

Roughly two miles down the road from Knob Creek farm, Lincoln sporadically attended with Sarah an ABC school—a so-called “blab” school in which the students repeated oral lessons from a teacher.

In the winter of 1816, the family left Knob Creek for a settlement in southern Indiana.