Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Boyhood 7th grade · age 12

[1]In the autumn of 1816, a farmer named Thomas Lincoln loaded his family onto a wagon and left Kentucky for good. He had a young son named Abraham, just seven years old, who would one day become one of America's most famous presidents, but for now he was simply a barefoot boy riding into the unknown with his father. Thomas had struggled for years with land titles (papers that prove you own your land) in Kentucky. Keeping your farm could mean long, costly court battles. He wanted land he could count on, in a place where all men were free. Indiana banned slavery, and the government stood behind every land title it sold. The family crossed the Ohio River by ferryboat and pressed into the thick forests of Spencer County, near a place called Little Pigeon Creek.

[2]Life in the Indiana woods was hard at first. The Lincolns' first shelter was a three-sided lean-to of logs and branches, open on one side to the wind and cold. That first winter, the family survived on what they could hunt, gather, and fish. Months passed before Thomas could raise a proper log cabin, with four walls chinked with mud. Even then, the floor was packed dirt. It was a hard beginning — but the Lincolns had land of their own, on free soil.

[3]Two years after the Lincolns settled at Little Pigeon Creek, life on their new land was finally starting to feel steady. But in the autumn of 1818, a mysterious illness called milk sickness swept through the settlement. The sickness came from drinking milk from cows that had eaten a toxic plant. Settlers had no idea what caused it or how to stop it. Several of the Lincolns' neighbors fell ill and died. Then Abraham's mother grew sick. For about a week she struggled, growing weaker in the rough log cabin. In October she died at the age of thirty-five. Abraham was not yet ten years old. He and his older sister now had to keep the household going on their own.

[4]In December 1819, Thomas Lincoln traveled back to Kentucky to find help for his family. He returned with a new wife, a cheerful widow who brought three children of her own. She cleaned up the household and raised Abraham and his sister as if they were her own children. Abraham always called her his mother for the rest of his life.

[5]Abraham Lincoln began to grow from the stability his stepmother created. He attended a few frontier schools when a traveling teacher passed through. But those stretches of schooling added up to less than a year in total. What filled the rest of his time was reading. Abraham read every book he could find: the family Bible, Aesop's Fables, a life of George Washington, and Pilgrim's Progress. He borrowed books from neighbors across a circuit of fifty miles. When the day's work was done, he would read by firelight late into the night. His stepmother encouraged the boy's hungry mind, even when others thought all that reading was a waste of time.

[6]By 1830, the Lincoln family was ready to move again. Thomas Lincoln headed west to Illinois, seeking better land. Abraham, now twenty-one years old, went with them. He was no longer the skinny, barefoot boy who had arrived in Indiana fourteen years earlier. His wit, his honesty, and his love of learning all came from those years in Indiana. By the time the Lincolns left for Illinois, Abraham's character was already formed.