Is Abe Lincoln's 'birthplace cabin' in Kentucky national park the real thing?

Editor's Note: This story, originally posted in 2022, is being brought back as part of our 2023 Winter Coverage.

On the property where he was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, lies the first memorial ever constructed to honor the life of former President Abraham Lincoln.

Opened with great fanfare in 1911, the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park features a stone monument building with a cabin inside that for many years was purported to be the very cabin where Lincoln was born.

But is that really the cabin where Lincoln was born?

According to ranger Stacy Humphreys, the chief of interpretation of the park, that answer is no.

While the memorial was built near where his birthplace cabin would have been located, Humphreys notes that it is referred to there and online as a "symbolic birth cabin" and "a symbol of where he was born."

"Unfortunately, we don't know what happened to their cabin, it's one of our park mysteries," she said.

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After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Humphreys said a Washington D.C. newspaper sent reporters to Hodgenville to locate his birth cabin, but when they came to the farm, "they couldn't even find foundation stone ... it had disappeared. We don't know if it burned down or what."

So where did the cabin come from that is the "symbol" of the real birth cabin? Well, that turns out to be a wild ride.

Humphreys said the cabin itself is somewhat historic, as scientists from a local university pulled 20 core samples from the logs in different sections to determine they were from the 1840s "and probably very similar to how the Lincolns would have lived" — though well after Lincoln's birth.

Through their research, they believe the logs of the cabin came from a local farm down the street from the park, near where a grocery store now sits.

The cabin itself was first obtained shortly before the turn of the century when Collier's magazine purchased the former Lincoln farm. Humphreys said it was then taken on tour "around the country with the supposed birth cabin of Jefferson Davis," the president of the Confederacy, who was also born in Kentucky.

The story gets a little stranger from there, according to an article from history magazine Not Even Past.

When the touring "birth cabins" of the opposing Civil War presidents reached Coney Island in Brooklyn, "parts of each cabin became mixed so they were simply joined together creating a single Lincoln-Davis Birthplace Cabin." The cabin was then sent back to Kentucky in 1906 in this form, when the idea was hatched for a national memorial to feature it.

The cornerstone of the Memorial Building on the park site was laid on Feb. 12, 1909 — the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth — at an event attended by President Theodore Roosevelt. The memorial was completed and dedicated in 1911 with President William Howard Taft in attendance — 11 years before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

While there are no signs in the memorial explaining the actual origin and whirlwind tour of the cabin itself, Humphreys said rangers and volunteers at the park "talk about the cabin and explain it, because we feel that's the best way to convey the story."

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There is also a second cabin in a different section of the park 10 miles away that purports to be the "boyhood home" of Lincoln from when he was age 2 to 8 years old — but again, Humphreys said this cabin is also symbolic and not the actual cabin where Lincoln lived.

While the cabin itself is on the same Knob Creek farm property where Lincoln lived as a boy, "we did a tree ring study on that and it dates from the 1860s, so that's too young of a cabin and it did not originally belong to the Lincoln family."

Humphreys said the family who developed the property in the early 20th century as a tourist destination got the cabin from a family known to be the neighbors of the Lincoln family, with the cabin itself being an authentic artifact and not a re-creation, like the symbolic birthplace cabin.

According to the park's website, it was on this farm that the man who would go on to sign the Emancipation Proclamation and win the Civil War first saw slaves being taken south along the Bardstown - Green River Turnpike to be sold.

The birthplace unit of the park is open Monday through Friday year round with exception of three holidays, and the boyhood cabin section of the park is only open regularly during the summer and parts of the spring and fall.

Reach reporter Joe Sonka at jsonka@courierjournal.com and follow him on Twitter at @joesonka.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Is the Abraham Lincoln 'birthplace cabin' in Kentucky the real thing?