Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park

Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln bought the roughly three hundred acre Sinking Spring Farm in late 1808, drawn like many settlers by the good limestone soil and the reliable spring that gave the place its name. It was hard, uncertain frontier land, and title disputes eventually cost the family the farm, part of the endless legal tangles over Kentucky land claims that pushed the Lincolns onward.

Long before any settler arrived, this country was a shared hunting ground of the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and other nations, whose ancestral ties to Kentucky run deep. Most were removed westward in the nineteenth century, and their descendant nations continue today, largely in Oklahoma and the Carolinas. The frontier the Lincolns knew was land these peoples had known for far longer.

The idea of protecting Lincoln's birthplace grew after the Civil War, as Americans looked back on the man who had held the Union together. In 1906 a group called the Lincoln Farm Association, backed by donations from ordinary citizens across the country, bought the land and set out to build a fitting memorial.

The Memorial Building was designed by the architect John Russell Pope, later known for the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in 1909, and President William Howard Taft dedicated the finished building in 1911. Its granite came from Connecticut and its marble from Tennessee, a grand statement rising over what had been a subsistence farm.

Inside sits a small log cabin long said to be Lincoln's birthplace. Careful study later showed the logs could not be the originals, so today it is honored as a symbolic cabin rather than the genuine article. That distinction takes nothing from the place. What draws people is standing on the very ground where the story of the sixteenth president began, in the plainest of surroundings, under one of the country's grandest memorials.

Beyond the memorial, wooded trails wind across the old farm, and a short path leads down to the Sinking Spring itself, a cool pool tucked under a limestone ledge that still runs as it did in Lincoln's day. An old white oak known as the Boundary Oak once marked a corner of the farm and stood as a living link to Lincoln's time before it finally died in the twentieth century.

A few miles northeast lies the second unit of the park, the Boyhood Home at Knob Creek, where the Lincolns moved when Abraham was about two and where he formed his first real memories. Together the two sites tell the story of his Kentucky childhood, from the farm where he was born to the creek-bottom fields where he began to grow up.

Spring brings green to the farm country and wildflowers along the wooded trails, an easy and pleasant time to walk the grounds between the memorial and the spring.

Summer is warm and full, the busiest stretch, with school groups and travelers passing through on the Lincoln trail across Kentucky and Indiana.

Fall is many visitors' favorite, when the hardwoods around the memorial turn gold and red and the light softens over the old fields.

Winter is quiet and bare, and February brings the anniversary of Lincoln's birth, marked here with wreaths and remembrance on the steps of the memorial.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.