page_title: Thomas Lincoln
section_title: Indiana
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Lincoln / Marriage and family / Indiana
caption_attribution_description: the foundation, all that remains, of the Lincoln's Indiana home
context_page_description: Thomas Lincoln was an American farmer, carpenter, and father of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Unlike some of his ancestors, Lincoln could not write. Lincoln struggled to make a successful living for his family and met challenges of Kentucky real estate border disputes, the early death of his first wife, and the integration of his second wife's family into his own family before making his final home in Illinois.
context_section_description: In December 1816, the Lincolns settled in the Little Pigeon Creek Community in what was then Perry County and is now Spencer County, Indiana. There Thomas and Abraham set to work carving a home from the Indiana wilderness. Father and son worked side by side to clear the land, plant the crops and build a home. Thomas also found that his skills as a carpenter were in demand as the community grew. Nancy's aunt Elisabeth Sparrow, uncle Thomas Sparrow, and cousin Dennis Hanks settled at Little Pigeon Creek the following fall.  While Abraham was ten years younger than his second cousin Dennis, the boys were good friends.
  In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln contracted milk sickness by drinking milk of a cow that had eaten the white snakeroot plant. There was no cure for the poison and on October 5, 1818, Nancy died.
  Lincoln, his children, Sophie Hanks, and Dennis Hanks lived alone for six months when he went back to Kentucky to seek a bride and courted Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow from Elizabethtown, Kentucky. On December 2, 1819 he married her and she brought her three children, Elizabeth, Matilda, and John, to join Abe, Sarah, and Dennis Hanks to make a new family of eight. Lincoln assisted in building the Little Pigeon Baptist Church, became a member of the church, and served as church trustee.  By 1827, Lincoln had become the proud owner of 100 acres of Indiana land.
  The family continued to live in extreme poverty in Indiana, according to family members, neighbors, and friends. There were times that the only food in the house was potatoes, and the children did not have sufficient clothes to wear. Abraham was not invited to a wedding because he did not have appropriate clothes to wear. Sarah was taken in by a local family and earned her room and board by performing housekeeping chores. Abraham's life was considered "one of hard labor and great privation."
  David Herbert Donald, noting that Thomas Lincoln's eyesight began to fail in the 1820s, described his struggle to support his family:
  In the early 1820s, Lincoln was under considerable financial pressure after his second marriage as he had to support a household of eight people. For a time he could rely on Dennis Hanks to help provide for his large family, but in 1826 Dennis married Elizabeth Johnston, Sarah Bush Lincoln's daughter, and moved to his own homestead. As Abraham became an adolescent, his father grew more and more to depend on him for the "farming, grubbing, hoeing, making fences" necessary to keep the family afloat. He also regularly hired his son out to work for other farmers in the vicinity, and by law he was entitled to everything the boy earned until he came of age.
caption: Foundation of the Lincoln home in the Little Pigeon Creek Community
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