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

IS THE CABIN AUTHENTIC?

129

Lincoln-between which-was a gateway leading to the house.
Mr. Creal remembers him well. Near the spot is a very romantic
spring from which the farm takes its name-8c where no doubt
Mr L as a Child often strayed. You will find Mr. Creal a truthful
Kind hearted man....2
For many years after the Civil War, few people even knew
where Abraham Lincoln's birthplace was located. Indeed,
the exact site was a controversial question even after 1900.3
Major S. P. Gross has the distinction of being the first to make
a serious attempt definitely to locate and mark the spot by
establishing a national park on the birthplace farm. He took
an option on the place early in 1894.
The accounts of this transaction indicate clearly that the
birthplace house had disappeared. They also indicate that
it was the plan of Major Gross to establish a shrine of national
interest like Mount Vernon and the Hermitage. There is no
explanation as to why the Gross enterprise failed to materialize. It is regrettable that this meritorious idea was far ahead
of the time.
Published in the announcement of the Gross option,4 to
emphasize the fact that the birthplace cabin was gone, was a
drawing of a cabin of round logs with one door, no window
and a mud-stick chimney. The drawing is stated to have been
made from memory, apparently by an old neighbor of the
Lincolns. This drawing, reproduced in the Louisville Times,
February 2, 1894, may be the genesis of the concept of the
Lincoln birthplace cabin which later materialized under the
creative promotion of one Alfred W. Dennett and his agent,
James W. Bigham.
2 Herdon-Weik Collection, Library of Congress.
8 For one of the more extreme accounts of Lincoln's background and birth, which
places the site in Poortown, Washington County, Kentucky, see J. W. S. Clements,
Origins of Clements-Spalding and Allied Families of Maryland and Kentucky
(1928), Appendix, pp. 2-4.
' Announced first in Louisville Times, February 2, 1894. Subsequent news
article, Louisville Commercial, March 26, 1894.