It has been stated, in Chapter VII., that in those days to be a "grocery-keeper" implied the selling of whisky. In his reply, Mr. Lincoln, using the third person, said:
"The judge is woefully at fault about his early friend Lincoln being a 'grocery-keeper.' I don't know as it would be a great sin if I had been; but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery anywhere in the world. It is true that Lincoln did work the latter part of one winter in a little still-house up at the head of a hollow."
Here Lincoln plainly denies ever keeping a grocery, but the query arises, Where did he "work the latter part of one winter in a little still-house, up at the head of a hollow"? In all the numerous Lincoln biographies I have ever examined I have never seen any reference to its location. But I have located the place.
Reference has been made to Henry Brooner, one of Lincoln's early associates in Indiana. At the time of giving the other items, more than twenty years ago, already mentioned, "Uncle Henry" made this statement, written at the time, the original still preserved:
"When I was about twenty-five years old [1829], Abraham Lincoln came to my house, where I now live, and left an article of agreement for me to keep. At that time, one mile north of here, there was a distillery owned by John Dutton. He employed John Johnston, Lincoln's step-brother, to run it that winter, and Lincoln left the article of agreement between the parties for me to keep."
"Oh, Uncle Henry," said I, "find that paper, and I will give you ten dollars for it." He said his house burned afterward, and all his papers were destroyed. He afterward built a brick house near the same foundation.
When "Uncle Henry" gave me this item, I had not read the celebrated Lincoln and Douglas debates, and, therefore, knew nothing of Lincoln's statement that he had worked at a still-house. When I read the debates, fifteen years later, and saw Lincoln's reference to his having "worked the latter part of one winter at a little still-house, up at the head of a hollow," I was at once struck with what "Uncle Henry" had told me. This certainly decides the fact that Lincoln had reference to the time when he worked at the Dutton distillery, when his step-brother, John Johnston, run it the winter before the Lincolns left for Illinois, in 1830.
John Kemp, my old friend and a highly-respected citizen, now sixty-three years old, who was born and reared on a farm adjoining Henry Brooner, told me in July, 1903, in Washington, Indiana, that north of the old Brooner farm there is an old farm still known as the "Dutton farm," and that he remembered seeing, often, when a small boy, near a spring, an old, dilapidated building called the "old still-house." He had never heard of John Johnston or of Abraham Lincoln working there, for that was before he was born. "Uncle Henry" had been dead thirteen years, but I had the record of the statement he made to me.
On a bright afternoon, September 7, 1903, Mr. Kemp took me in his buggy to see the place. The farm was then owned by John and Harmon Steineker, and is on the old Fredonia and Princeton highway, four miles southwest of Huntingburg, Dubois County, Indiana. Here is the "Dutton farm," and here is a spring in the barn lot. Just across the road, to the right, is where the old "still-house" stood, and there is the "hollow" running down through the forest. As I viewed the scene, I felt something within me akin to what old Archimedes felt when he discovered the solution to an important mathematical problem, and exclaimed, "Eureka! Eureka!" ("I have found it! I have found it!").