By RICK CALLAHAN/AP
Indianapolis — Indiana gets no respect when it comes to Abraham Lincoln.
The state where the 16th president spent a quarter of his life is perennially in the shadows of Kentucky, where he was born, and Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln” where he spent 30 years until moving to Washington.
But Indiana officials hope to grab a share of the spotlight surrounding Thursday’s 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, bringing attention — and visitors — to the southwestern Indiana county where he lived from age 7 to 21.
“Those are the formative years when your moral character and values are established, so we certainly have a lot to be proud of in this wonderful man,” said Connie Nass, Indiana’s former state auditor. “Indiana figures so prominently in his life — it’s where he spent his boyhood.”
Nass, who heads the Indiana Lincoln bicentennial commission that has planned a year of events, said she’s shocked by how many people don’t know that Lincoln spent a quarter of his life in Indiana’s Spencer County, which abuts the Ohio River.
It’s a sore point for Gov. Mitch Daniels, too.
Daniels recently fired off a letter to the editor of Newsweek in response to the magazine’s article in which author Christopher Hitchens stated that Lincoln “never really lived” in a log cabin.
“The structure in southern Indiana where Lincoln spent his 14 formative years was, by every contemporary account, including Honest Abe’s own, a ’log cabin,”’ Daniels wrote, inviting Hitchens to Indiana to see the site.
The Lincoln family’s log cabin no longer stands, but the homestead site is preserved at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, which attracts about 200,000 visitors each year. It also includes a living-history farm with historical interpreters, a museum and the grave of Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln.
The grave of his sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, is about a mile away in Lincoln State Park.
“Their graves are really our strongest ties to Lincoln’s life in Indiana,” said Melissa Miller, executive director of the Spencer County Visitors Bureau.
As a 9-year-old, Lincoln watched his mother succumb to what was then called “milk sickness.” Sufferers either drank milk or ate meat from a cow that had grazed on the poisonous white snakeroot plant, although that link wasn’t known until decades later.
Her death in 1818 left Lincoln with an early sense of human mortality, said William Bartelt, author of “There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana Youth.”
Thomas Lincoln, a farmer, remarried about a year later. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln bonded with Lincoln and his older sister and encouraged young Abe’s voracious appetite for reading and learning, said Bartelt, an adjunct history professor at the University of Southern Indiana.
“We can’t underestimate the importance of Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, who came in and showed him a great deal of love and I think really built up his self-confidence,” he said. “She destroys all of the stepmother myths. She said he was the best boy she ever saw.”
Months after the 1828 death of his sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, the 19-year-old Lincoln and another man, Allen Gentry, departed from Rockport, Ind., on a flatboat loaded with cargo bound for New Orleans’ markets to deliver the goods for Gentry’s father.
Lincoln saw a large swath of the nation and witnessed a slave auction — a disturbing experience that historians say influenced his views on slavery.
Two years later, his extended family left Indiana amid signs of another possible “milk sickness” outbreak, as well as a relative’s description of rich farmland in Illinois, Bartelt said.
As president, Lincoln rarely spoke about his years in Indiana, but he wrote a handful of poems and other accounts of those early years. In one, he wrote, “It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.”
Indiana wants to make sure people don’t forget.
Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard made light of how the state is overlooked in the Lincoln story during his January state of the judiciary address.
“What is this stuff about Abraham Lincoln being given to our country by Illinois?” he asked, before repeating to applause a favorite phrase of former Gov. Otis Bowen:
“Indiana made Lincoln and Lincoln made Illinois!”
