The Lincolns Move West

Samuel Lincoln, the great, great, great, great grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln, left England in 1637 and settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, and over the next four generations the family continued moving south and west to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and finally Virginia. About 1782, Captain Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the sixteenth president, left Rockingham County, Virginia, with his wife, Bersheba, and their five children, entered Kentucky through Cumberland Gap, and settled in what is today Casey County. About 1784, he moved his family to Jefferson County, where he was killed in an Indian attack in May 1786. Soon afterward, Bersheba Lincoln moved the family to what is today Washington County. Their youngest son, Thomas, married Nancy Hanks in 1806, and while living in Elizabethtown their first child, Sarah, was born in 1807. The family moved to the Sinking Spring farm in 1808, where their first son, Abraham, was born in 1809, and two years later they moved to the Knob Creek farm, where he spent his early childhood. The family remained there until 1816, when problems with the farm's title led Thomas Lincoln to leave Kentucky for Indiana and later Illinois. As a young adult, Abraham Lincoln moved to New Salem, where he eventually established a law practice, and after his second election to the state legislature he moved to Springfield, the state capital. Though he left Kentucky before his tenth year, he retained a strong attachment to the state; his wife, Mary Todd, was a Kentuckian, as were many of his close friends, including Joshua Speed, William H. Herndon, and Cassius Marcellus Clay.

Kentucky · United States