Lincoln's Boyhood Home at Knob Creek

Thomas and Nancy Lincoln moved their young family to Knob Creek in 1811, when Abraham was about two years old, leaving the Sinking Spring farm where he had been born. The Knob Creek land was better for farming, a ribbon of fertile bottomland along the creek, and here the Lincolns raised corn and pumpkins in the rich valley soil while the wooded hills climbed steeply on both sides.

It was at Knob Creek that Lincoln's memory truly began. He later recalled planting pumpkin seeds with his father, only to watch a sudden mountain rain wash the whole crop down the valley. He remembered nearly drowning in the swollen creek and being pulled out by a friend. He remembered, too, walking a couple of miles to a rough log schoolhouse for a few weeks of the only formal schooling he would ever get as a child. These small, vivid scenes are the earliest we have of the man who would become the sixteenth president.

The Lincoln farm fronted the Louisville-to-Nashville road, one of the busiest routes through early Kentucky, so the traffic of a young nation flowed past the family's cabin. Wagons of settlers rolled toward the frontier, drovers pushed livestock to market, and peddlers stopped to trade. For a curious boy it was a window onto a country far larger than his valley.

It was also here, historians believe, that Lincoln first saw enslaved people being marched south in chains along that same road. Kentucky was a slave state, and the sight of coffles passing the family's door left an impression that stayed with him. The Lincolns themselves left Kentucky partly over unclear land titles and partly, Lincoln later said, because of slavery, moving north across the Ohio River to free soil in Indiana in 1816.

After the Lincolns left, the Knob Creek farm stayed in private hands and was worked and lived on for generations. In the early 1930s the Howard family opened it as a roadside historic attraction, building a log cabin and a tavern to help visitors picture the vanished frontier, and their descendants kept it going for decades.

In 2001 the family donated the site to the National Park Service, which added it to Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park and, because the park now held two separate places, changed its name to a national historical park. Today the reconstructed cabin, the tavern, and the surrounding fields and creek are preserved so visitors can stand in the real landscape of Lincoln's boyhood, a plainer and more intimate place than the grand memorial down the road.

The Knob Creek unit lies about seven miles northeast of Hodgenville along the Bardstown Road, roughly ten minutes from the birthplace unit, so the two make a natural pair on the same trip. The setting is quiet and green, with the reconstructed cabin and tavern near the road and short trails leading back along the creek and into the trees. Give yourself an hour or so to walk the ground and picture the family that once farmed it.

The site is open seasonally and its programs run mainly in the warmer months, so check ahead before a long drive. Pair it with the marble memorial at the birthplace and a stop in Hodgenville, whose town square is watched over by two Lincoln statues, for a full and unhurried day in the country where the man who held the Union together first learned to walk, wade, and wonder.

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