Abraham Lincoln

Residence 1

📍2995 Lincoln Farm Road, Hodgenville, KY 42748, USA

“I was born on the 12th of February 1809 in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky — a three-sided structure with a dirt floor, which is about as modest as American beginnings get. My father Thomas was a farmer who moved the family to Indiana when I was seven after a land title dispute, and then to Illinois when I was twenty-one. The Kentucky cabin, the Indiana farm, the Illinois frontier — these were an education in the America that existed before the cities and the institutions, the America of hard physical work and very limited possibility, from which I nonetheless managed to educate myself through borrowed books and firelight. I became a lawyer and then a politician and then President, and I never forgot where I came from or what it cost people who had less luck than I did.”

Sources: Donald, D. Lincoln (1995), Simon & Schuster; Goodwin, D.K. Team of Rivals (2005), Simon & Schuster

Residence 2

📍7120 Bardstown Road, Hodgenville, KY 42748, USA

“We moved to Knob Creek when I was two years old, and here my clearest earliest memories were formed: the creek that flooded each spring and drove us to higher ground, the hills of Kentucky that my father Thomas farmed with borrowed tools on leased land, the garden where I helped plant and pull from the time I could walk steadily. My brother Thomas was born here and died in infancy. I fell into the creek once and nearly drowned before a neighbour's boy pulled me out by the hair. I attended two subscription schools for perhaps a year in total — brush arbour affairs where we wrote letters with charcoal on wooden boards. When I was seven, a land-title dispute caused my father to lose the farm and we crossed into Indiana. I never lost the cadence of those Kentucky hills, not in all the years of law practice and politics that followed. The poverty, the tenancy, the uncertainty of a life built on borrowed ground — those I carried everywhere.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Lincoln's Boyhood Home

Residence 3

📍Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site, 15588 History Lane, Petersburg, IL 62675, USA

“I lived in New Salem, a village of about a hundred people on a bluff above the Sangamon River in Illinois, from 1831 to 1837 — six years that were the most important of my education. I arrived at twenty-two as a flatboat hand who had drifted downriver from Indiana, a young man of almost no formal schooling who nonetheless read every book he could find by firelight. In New Salem I ran a store, served in the Black Hawk War, was appointed postmaster, studied law from borrowed books, and was elected to the Illinois state legislature. The village gave me the human education that no school could have provided: I listened to every kind of person, learned to tell a story that could hold a room, and understood that the republic was made of ordinary men and women whose lives and opinions mattered to its survival.”

Sources: Wilson, D. Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998), Knopf; Donald, D. Lincoln (1995), Simon & Schuster

Residence 4

📍413 South 8th Street, Springfield, IL 62701, USA

“I moved to Springfield, Illinois in 1837 when I was twenty-eight years old — a young lawyer with a borrowed horse and two saddlebags — and lived there until I left for Washington as President-elect in 1861. The house on Eighth and Jackson Streets was the only home I ever owned, bought in 1844 for fifteen hundred dollars, and it was where my sons were born and where my son Eddie died. Springfield was a small state capital on the Illinois prairie, and it suited me: the legal practice, the courthouse friendships, the political world of the Illinois General Assembly, the community of a town that knew me as Lincoln the lawyer and Lincoln the husband and Lincoln the father rather than Lincoln the President. I said goodbye to Springfield on February 11, 1861 and told the crowd I did not know if I would ever return. I did not.”

Sources: Donald, D. Lincoln (1995), Simon & Schuster; White, R. A. Lincoln: A Biography (2009), Random House

Residence 5

📍1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, United States

“I came to this house in March of 1861 and I knew immediately that it was not a home — it was a post. The country was already breaking apart before I had unpacked a single bag. I held meetings here through the night, read telegrams from the battlefield, and wrote letters I did not want to write. Mary tried to make the rooms feel liveable and I was grateful for the effort. I signed the Emancipation Proclamation at a desk in this building, on the first day of 1863, my hand shaking from hours of handshaking at a New Year's reception. I do not know that I ever truly rested inside these walls. The war was always here with me, in every room. I could hear the wounded being treated in the building nearby. Four years in this house aged me more than any other four years of my life, but they were the four years that mattered most.”

Sources: Lincoln's White House years are documented in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals (2005) and Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939).