Lincoln log cabin in kentucky8/29/2023 ![]() Though Pope’s design was probably influenced by Charles McKim’s Morgan Library (1907) in New York, it also has much in common with other memorials of the era, including those to Presidents Grant (1891–1897) and McKinley (1905–1907). This design was beyond the means of the Lincoln Farm Association and Pope scaled back his plans to produce a dignified Memorial Building at the top of a knoll, well above the actual Sinking Spring. ![]() It included a larger memorial building with an arcaded central court surrounded by exhibition halls and an auditorium. Pope’s original scheme was far grander than what was eventually built. Pope studied architecture at Columbia University, won the prestigious Rome Prize to study at the American Academy in Rome, spent two years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and worked for the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead and White. At the time, he was one of America’s consummate masters of classicism. The Lincoln Farm Association originally considered staging a competition for the design of the Lincoln birthplace memorial but ultimately commissioned John Russell Pope directly. It seems likely that the little structure enshrined in Hodgenville is made up of logs from both of the supposed Lincoln and Davis cabins. They trimmed the logs to fit and burned the discarded pieces to keep them out of the hands of treasure hunters. According to popular lore, when workers attempted to reassemble the Lincoln Log Cabin inside John Russell Pope’s already completed temple, they discovered it too large for the space. If the Association knew it now possessed both the Lincoln and the Davis cabins, it was kept secret. In 1901 Bigham and Dennett sent the cabins north to the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, where they were displayed facing each other as part of “The Old Plantation” concession, which also contained five other equally humble log structures, including slave cabins.įinally, in 1906, they sold the Lincoln Birthplace Log Cabin to the Lincoln Farm Association but both cabins were shipped from storage in New York to Kentucky. According to press accounts, the cabins were on view in the midway, each fitted out with furniture and personal effects of the Lincoln and Davis families. Two years later at Nashville’s Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition they exhibited the Lincoln log cabin alongside the birthplace log cabin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. They hoped to make a profit charging admission to view the cabin during the commemorative encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic in Louisville in 1895. In 1894 Alfred Dennett and the Reverend James Bigham purchased the cabin from a man who claimed that he had purchased it from Abraham Lincoln’s father. The history of that log cabin is long and complicated. Nonetheless, in 1911 Lincoln’s supposed birthplace cabin was enshrined inside a Greek-inspired, Beaux-Arts temple designed by John Russell Pope and paid for by the Lincoln Farm Association and the United States government. ![]() In his own words: “I was born February 12, 1809, in the then Hardin County, Kentucky, at the point within the now County of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half from where Hodgen’s Mill now is…I know no means of identifying the precise locality.” As for the log cabin, the one displayed repeatedly at world’s fairs became a virtual national icon even though its authenticity has been in doubt since its first public showing. Lincoln himself was never clear as to the precise location of his birth. Ours needed to be a bit larger than Lincoln’s to accommodate visitors walking through the structure.It is one of America’s most enduring legends that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin on the Sinking Spring farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky. It may seem small but the cabin at the museum is actually larger than we think the real Lincoln may have been. The result looks and feels authentic, because it is! Each was shipped to Springfield and reassembled, using genuine materials and techniques. A second one, 20’x20’, was located in storage in Abington, Virginia. The logs constructing the cabin have the authentic look and feel of a 19th century cabin, because…they really are a 19th century cabin! A 30’x30’ tobacco barn, built in the mid-1800s and very similar in style to Lincoln’s, was found in storage in Cynthiana, Kentucky. With this information, high fidelity reproductions of Black and White Oak, Ash, Sugar Maple and Flowering Dogwood were made and placed in a natural setting around the cabin. With the help of historians, studies were made of what the dominant plant growth was in Indiana in the early 19th century. Our cabin is based on what little is known about the Lincoln Boyhood Home in Indiana, 1818 - the third log cabin in which young Lincoln lived with his family after they moved from Kentucky where he was born. The original one-room boyhood log cabin home of Lincoln no longer exists. ![]()
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