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Authors: Rae Katherine Eighmey

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My childhood's home I see again,

And sadden with the view;

And still, as mem'ries crowd my brain,

There's pleasure in it too.…

[
last verse
]

The very spot where grew the bread

That formed my bones, I see.

How strange, old field, on thee to tread,

And feel I'm part of thee!

—A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN
, 1846

M
ore than any other president, Abraham
Lincoln was a son of the soil. Most of the first fifteen presidents farmed or owned plantations, as did 80 percent of the nation at the time. Millard Fillmore and James Polk were born in log cabins in what could be considered frontier settings—Fillmore in New York and Polk in North Carolina. Only Lincoln took an ax in his hands and helped chop the family homestead out of the forest.

The Lincolns lived on their farm near the southwest tip of Indiana for almost fourteen years, arriving from Kentucky in December of 1816 and leaving for Illinois in March 1830. Abraham grew up there. He was nearly eight when they arrived and twenty-one when they left. This was the land that formed him. He wrote a long poem, excerpted above, after a visit to his old neighborhood almost twenty years after the family had moved to Illinois. The sight of that land moved him to consider his past. It moved me, too.

Lincoln's farm field is still there. From mid-April through September, the National Park Service works the family's farm as an 1820s interpretive site. In the early afternoon, two days after Christmas, I was the only visitor. When I walked on the farm 162 years after Lincoln's visit, I was alone with the spirit of the place. There are a great many stories in this land. Standing there in silence, the wind whispered faintly, seemingly calling to me: notice, remember, consider, and imagine.

It was an unusually warm day, even for southern Indiana. The rich loamy smell of damp soil, not yet mud slick, lingered in the air. Light filtered through the leafless trees densely foresting much of the site. None of the pictures in the scores of Lincoln books adequately convey the sense of the place.

I walked away from the visitor center across the large open mall toward the American flag flapping on a tall pole. It didn't take long to climb the gentle flight of steps to the top of the hill. A quick step left onto the path through the trees and I was next to the pioneer
cemetery, on what used to be a neighbor's farm, where Lincoln's mother, Nancy, is buried. Years after the president's death, the handsome marble marker was placed over what was thought to be her actual
gravesite. Young Abraham and his sister, Sarah, wouldn't have needed a marker; they would have known just where she lay. Although Sarah (also called Sally)
Johnston came to be their warm, kind, and generous stepmother just fourteen months later, seeing the relationship of the cemetery to the farm reinforced in my mind that Lincoln's “angel mother” was never far from his thoughts.

It took me just six minutes to walk down the fairly steep slope, across a small gully and onto Lincoln's land, the cabin reconstruction, and the farm fields. The cabin is on the high point of the land, situated nicely to capture the lightest summer breeze, yet protected from sharp, scouring winds of winter by the cemetery hill. This reconstructed cabin is just a few yards from the original cabin site. Workers for the WPA found the hearthstones in 1931. Today bronze replicas of those stones glimmer faintly at one end, assembled to represent the hearth of the spectral cabin. Others inside the high stone wall outline the footprint of the Lincolns' 22-x-16-foot home.

On an early winter day, the historic site is far enough off the beaten
tourist path and highways to almost shut out the mechanized hum of modern life. But this silence is misleading. The
Lincoln
farm was not a shrine frozen in time. There would have been smells and sounds and people. And it was a dynamic place, changing rapidly during the years the family lived there.

For all the thousands of pages written about Lincoln's life, the Indiana and earlier Kentucky years are not well documented. Lincoln wrote less than half a page in a seven-page 1860 autobiography, giving scant details beyond his work with an ax and a bit about hunting. Neighbors' memories collected by William Herndon, Jesse Weik,
Ida Tarbell, and
others describe daily life, including foods. I've resigned myself to the realization that, with the exception of those few specifics mentioned in memoirs, I will never know what Abraham Lincoln ate for the more than fifteen thousand meals cooked on those hearthstones.

Certainly he would have been eating a lot. As his cousin John
Hanks remembered, “Abraham was a hearty eater. Loved good eating. His own mother and step-mother were good cooks for the day and time.”

My visit to the cabin site was one of those times I really wished I had a time machine. I got so close to feeling the sense of the place while I was walking there alone. I could almost smell the wood fires from neighborhood fireplaces and smokehouses curing meat, hear the thwack of an ax splitting logs, the laughter of children, the voices of cows, horses, chickens—the noises of settled farm life. But wishing alone isn't enough.

I began considering as I walked toward the cabin reconstruction. The setting looked well civilized. The cabin and small barn are set neatly near the kitchen garden patch and close to a six-acre field ready and waiting for spring planting. There are other outbuildings in the yard, a clear indication of
self-sufficiency and prosperity: smokehouse, corncrib, and a carpentry shop, especially important for Thomas Lincoln's work as a skilled
carpenter who built homes and crafted fine furniture for the
Little Pigeon Creek neighborhood. This is the successful farm of 1824 to 1830, near the end of their time in Indiana, “when the Lincolns planted ten acres of
corn, five of wheat, two of oats and an acre left to meadow,” as Dennis Hanks told Herndon.

The trees of “unbroken forest” they encountered in 1816 were gone. So were the “many bears and other animals still in the woods.” Life for
the Lincolns on the Hoosier frontier was a time of rapid change. I wanted to find a food approach that would help explain those changes. I have a great many recipes from pioneer sources. Though pioneer cabin cookery is important to understanding the period and the dishes are delightful to taste, there is a much larger story from those fourteen years in Indiana than a set of recipes from hearth and home alone could convey.

On the way back to the car and the twenty-first century, I considered what I had read in the Herndon memoirs, nineteenth-century agricultural journals, and cookbooks. I realized that three foods—pawpaws, honey, and pumpkins—tell the story of growth from frontier life into established settlement. Each presents a key aspect of the way settlers interacted with nature and how the community and
Lincoln grew.

When the Lincolns hacked their way through the vines and saplings to reach the small clearing and lean- to shelter Thomas had prepared, they were the first settler family on that section of land and one of the first in what would become Spencer County.

The Lincoln and Hanks families had settled on new land before. Ancestors on both sides arrived in America during the seventeenth century. They had known the challenges and hardships of breaking new territory. Later, as
children in Kentucky, both of Lincoln's parents lost their fathers. Thomas continued to live with his widowed mother. He learned carpentry and farming skills while working for friends and relatives. In 1803 he purchased his first farm. He was twenty-seven years old. Three years later he sold 2,400 pounds of pork and 494 pounds of beef in
Elizabethtown trade. Clearly he had learned his lessons well.

After Nancy's father died, her mother remarried, and Nancy was raised in the “pleasant and comfortable” home of her elderly maternal uncle and aunt, Richard and Rachael Berry, going to school and learning how to spin and weave. Upon their deaths, she continued to live in the household then headed by her cousin, Richard Berry, Jr. The elder Berry's tax records and will showed how successful he had become. He had six hundred acres of land, horses, cattle, furniture, and kitchen goods—plates, dishes, pots, kettles, and a
Dutch oven. He also
owned three slaves—a woman named Nan, her daughter, Hannah, and a boy, Fill.

So, when Thomas and the family moved into the new state of Indiana, they were drawing upon their own successful pioneering heritage
to gain a foothold in a free state of limitless promise. In another poem, “The Bear Hunt,” written about the same time as the lines beginning this chapter,
Lincoln described the wildness of that early settlement:

When first my father settled here.

'Twas then the frontier line:

The Panther's scream, filled the night with fear

And bears preyed on the swine.

Nancy Lincoln's aunt and uncle,
Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, with their ward Dennis Hanks, arrived sometime in the fall of 1817. These new Hoosiers, descendants of hardworking farmers, had skills and knowledge to live off the land before their farms were in production. When they left Kentucky for the
Indiana frontier, they left behind the possibility of shopping in
Elizabethtown, Nancy bartering her eggs for flour, her peaches for spices, or Thomas buying sugar or molasses with coins received for furniture he made and sold. For the first months on the Indiana farmstead, the Lincolns, Sparrows, and their few
neighbors would have been pretty much
self-sufficient, by necessity living a real lesson in eating locally and seasonally until they could clear farmlands and plant their crops. In short, they were gathering and
hunting their food, rather than planting and growing it.

But what food it was! Reading early Hoosiers' lists of wild fruits,
game, and fish, I was struck by the diverse and healthful
supply of food and how much of it I've had the luck to eat. Some of the meats common in Lincoln's forest, such as bear, are virtually impossible to find, and even if you do, according to recent Centers for Disease Control research, bear meat is infested with parasitic trichinous and unsafe to eat. However, you can find rabbit and duck, along with pheasant and venison, even if you aren't friends with someone who hunts or fishes. Markets carry those meats and a few of the fish as well, especially in the Midwest. Among those freshwater fish listed by Hoosier neighbors were catfish, perch, carp, bass, skipjacks, black fin, suckers, pike, garfish, shovel fish, sturgeons, minnows, sunfish, eels, and soft-shelled turtles.

Certainly there was plenty of protein in those first years. Various neighbors recalled Abraham's skills obtaining it.
A. H. Chapman,
a
neighbor, told Herndon that Lincoln “never cared much for
hunting or fishing yet when a youth was successful as a hunter and a fine shot with a Rifle.” E. R. Burba, a neighbor from Kentucky, recounted settlers' memories of Lincoln and reported that he combined his hunting and woodsman skills. Burba said that Lincoln had a “fondness for fishing and hunting with his dog & axe. When his dog would run a rabbit in a hollow tree he would chop it out.” Transplanted Londoner James Woods described the same behavior. “Rabbits are tolerably plentiful.… They do not burrow in the earth, but when hunted run into the hollow trees so that an axe is necessary in rabbit hunting.”

J. W. Wartmann, an old Lincoln neighbor, wrote a list of the fruits of the forest there for the gathering: mulberries, hickory nuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, black walnuts.
Elizabeth Crawford, another neighbor, expanded the list: winter grape, fox grape,
wild plums, wild cherry, black haw, red haw, crab apple, blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry, dewberry, strawberry, persimmons, and the
pawpaw.

The pawpaw, sometimes called the “Hoosier banana,” is an unusual fruit with a complex, rich, and fragrant flavor, packed with vitamins, minerals, and even amino acids. Pawpaws ripen over a four-week period from August to October depending on where they grow. Ripe fruit is soft and keeps for only two or three days. I've tried to imagine the impact this richly flavored fruit would have on a pioneer's taste. It is the only fruit Dennis Hanks mentioned in his interviews.

Certainly there were other sweet fruits. Peaches were grown in southern Indiana orchards.
Pineapples had been used as the welcome sign in cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts since the colonial period. Miss
Leslie of Philadelphia has a recipe for preserving pineapple in her 1828 receipt book. Other tropical fruits flourished in Florida in the 1820s as one southern traveler described: “The banana, the plantain, the pine apple [
sic
], the cocoanut [
sic
] and most of the tropical fruits flourish.… Figs, oranges, limes, lemons and all varieties of citrons … thrive.” For all this bounty, I've not seen any evidence that those fruits could have been common, or even known, in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys in the 1820s.

The imperative chorus of an old folk song demonstrates the joy of pawpaws—children run “way down yonder to the pawpaw patch … pickin' up pawpaws, put 'em in your pockets.” Beyond nutrition, exotic flavor,
and delight in eating, I see the pawpaw as a horticultural metaphor for pioneer settlement. One plant's success becomes the foundation for many more. A single pawpaw sends out runner roots, matting the sub-surface of the soil. These roots send up new trees (technically branches from the same original tree), and soon the single pawpaw has become a patch.

One settler, James A. Little, wrote in 1905, “We can never realize what a great blessing the pawpaw was to the first settlers.… Well do I remember sixty or more years ago my father would take his gun and basket and go to the
woods and return in the evening loaded with pawpaws, young squirrel, and sometimes mushrooms of which he was very fond. There will never be a recurrence of those which were the happiest days of my life.”

Abraham
Lincoln expressed yet another view of pioneer life. He wrote succinctly, “I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two.” He also wrote that his father put an ax into his hands when they arrived in
Indiana. Fellow Hoosiers remembered his skill. “His ax would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, down it would come. If you heard him felling trees in a
clearing, you would say there were three men at work.”

BOOK: Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen
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