To a boy of seven years, free from all responsibility, and too vigorous to feel its hardships, such a journey must have been, as William Cooper Howells, the father of the novelist, says of his own trip from Virginia to Ohio, in 1813, “a panorama of delightful novelty.” Life suddenly ceased its routine, and every day brought forth new scenes and adventures. Little Abraham saw forests greater than he had ever dreamed of, peopled by strange birds and beasts, and he crossed a river so wide that it must have seemed to him like the sea. To Thomas and Nancy Lincoln the journey was probably a hard and sad one; but to the children beside them it was a wonderful voyage into the unknown.
A NEW HOME IN INDIANA.
On arriving at the new farm an axe was put into the boy’s hands, and he was set to work to aid in clearing a field for corn, and to help build the “half-face camp” which for a year was the home of the Lincolns. There were few more primitive homes in the wilderness of Indiana in 1816 than this of young Lincoln’s, and there were few families, even in that day, who were forced to practise more makeshifts to get a living. The cabin which took the place of the “half-face camp” had but one room, with a loft above. For a long time there was no window, door, or floor; not even the traditional deer-skin hung before the exit; there was no oiled paper over the opening for light; there was no puncheon covering on the ground.
THE OLD SWIMMING-HOLE.
A secluded part of Little Pigeon Creek, not far from Gentryville, where Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, John Johnston, the Gentry boys, and others of the neighborhood used to bathe. It is still pointed out as “the place where Abe went in swimming.”
BRICK-MOULD USED BY THOMAS LINCOLN.
From a photograph loaned by Jesse W. Weik.
The furniture was of their own manufacture. The table and chairs were of the rudest sort—rough slabs of wood in which holes were bored and legs fitted in. Their bedstead, or, rather, bed-frame, was made of poles held up by two outer posts, and the ends made firm by inserting the poles in auger-holes that had been bored in a log which was a part of the wall of the cabin; skins were its chief covering. Little Abraham’s bed was even more primitive. He slept on a heap of dry leaves in the corner of the loft, to which he mounted by means of pegs driven into the wall.
WELL DUG BY LINCOLN.
In a field near the Crawford house is a well which is pointed out to sight-seers as one which Lincoln helped to dig. Many things about the Crawford place—fences, corn-cribs, house, barn—were built in part by Lincoln.