The
Lincoln Trail Homestead is the location of the first Lincoln
family settlement in Illinois. Thomas Lincoln, his wife,
step-son, two step-daughters and their husbands and children,
along with young Abraham, lived in that location approximately
twelve months. After an arduous winter of 1830-31, and illness
in the family, Thomas Lincoln moved his family to Coles County,
to the area now known as the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic
Site. Abraham did not accompany them, but remained in central
Illinois to make his own way, and the rest, as they say,
is history. The family’s coming to settle in central
Illinois happened this way…
On the first day of March in 1830, Thomas
Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s father, sold his squatter’s
claims in Spencer County, Indiana and started out for Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln was 21 at the time, and
drove one of the teams of oxen pulling one of the wagons
containing the family’s personal effects, on a two hundred mile journey to Macon County, Illinois. The arduous, muddy journey, took the thirteen family members fifteen days. (Today, a moving van could make the journey in about 4 - 5 hours). They arrived at a spot on the north side of the Sangamon River, ten miles southwest of downtown Decatur, in what is now known as Harristown Township. There, where the timberland and prairie met on the banks of the river, Abraham Lincoln helped his father erect a log cabin where the large, extended family settled comfortably. When the cabin and the outbuildings were completed, the young Abraham Lincoln helped to split enough rails to fence off a 10-acre area of the homestead. He then broke the ground, and planted the family’s
first corn crop in Illinois. When he finished these familial
duties, he expressed to his family his intention to set out
and make his own fortune.
He did not, however, leave Decatur immediately that first summer. He remained in the immediate area, breaking up land with teams of oxen for other settlers, helping them to put in crops, splitting rails and chopping wood as a hired man.
In March of 1831, as his father and the
rest of the family were relocating to Coles County, Abraham
Lincoln, along with his cousin John Hanks and his step-brother,
John D. Johnson, struck out for Springfield. After spending
about six months building a flatboat and piloting it to New
Orleans for Denton Offutt, Abraham Lincoln settled in the
New Salem area and began working at Offutt’s mercantile
there. While residing in that area, he served in the Illinois
militia, purchased a mercantile of his own, worked as a surveyor,
and served in the Illinois legislature, before becoming a
practicing attorney in 1837 and subsequently moving to Springfield.
From that point the political history of Lincoln as an attorney,
legislator, congressman and eventually President is well-known
by all Americans.
The Lincoln family cabin from the homestead
near Harristown in Macon County stood where it had been erected
until 1876. At that time it was dismantled and taken to Philadelphia
for the nation’s centennial celebration, where it was
reassembled and viewed by thousands of people during the
great exposition. A cabin was constructed in the 1970’s
at the Homestead site, but was destroyed by fire soon after
it was built.
The 164-acre Lincoln Trail Homestead site has great historic
significance directly related to the Lincoln family. Lincoln
buffs, historians and the Looking for Lincoln coalition have
high hopes that the site will be developed as an additional
Lincoln-related historic site in central Illinois, in time
for nationwide observances of the Lincoln Bi-centennial in
2009, in which central Illinois will play a significant part.
