Abraham Lincoln quarterly. [Vol. 5, no. 3]

162 ABRAHAM LINCOLN QUARTERLY
Nichols, who was writing a biography of Lincoln for the publishing firm of Mast, Crowell and Kirkpatrick, at Springfield,
Ohio. He was a resident of Springfield, Ohio, and had been
editor of the local Republic Times for over thirty years.
Under a cut of the Evans photograph of the purported
Lincoln birthplace cabin, Nichols mentions John A. Davenport and states that the cabin is not the authentic birthplace
cabin and furnishes a report of his investigation substantiating his conclusion.57
In the summer of i909, Admiral Lucien Young, a Kentuckian of outstanding attainment, branded the Lincoln
birthplace cabin a hoax. No retiring Milquetoast was Admiral Young. In a published article, he said, "a rude log
cabin figures extensively as being the hut in which Lincoln
was born: an antique that evidently emanated from the fruitful brain of some imaginative and enthusiastic showman. As
a boy in the '6os, I attended school at Hodgenville and used to
romp and play over the Lincoln farm and I never saw any
such cabin on the place then. This cabin, to be encased in
the marble structure, is evidently a dingy structure of logs
put together a few years ago to enhance the exhibition at
Nashville, Tennessee, and subsequently sold to some exhibitors who took it about the country as a traveling show.
The advertisement of this log cabin was profuse. Even a
neighbor of the Lincolns was found to testify that he went to
Hodgenville for the doctor to attend the birth of
Abraham." 58
Robert Todd Lincoln never believed the cabin to be authentic. On August 25, 1919, he wrote to Otto Wiecker of
New York, "... the lithograph you mention possesses no
interest for me. It is of course the work of some person ignorant of the probable environments of the event. So with pre7 Clifton M. Nichols, Life of Abraham Lincoln (1896), p. 18.
68 Sunset Magazine, August, 1909, pp. 136-137.