1806. I
was hunting roots for my medicine and just went to the wedding to get a
good supper and got it.

"Tom Lincoln was a carpenter, and a good one for those days, when a
cabin was built mainly with the ax, and not a nail or a bolt or hinge in
it, only leathers and pins to the doors, and no glass, except in watches
and spectacles and bottles. Tom had the best set of tools in what was
then and is now Washington County.

"Jesse Head, the good Methodist minister that married them, was also a
carpenter or cabinet maker by trade, and as he was then a neighbor, they
were good friends.

"While you pin me down to facts, I will say that I saw Nancy Hanks
Lincoln at her wedding, a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty.
Tom was a respectable mechanic and could choose, and she was treated
with respect.

"I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian, and
only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had bear
meat; venison; wild turkey and ducks' eggs, wild and tame--so common
that you could buy them at two bits a bushel; maple sugar, swung on a
string, to bite off for coffee; syrup in big gourds, peach and honey; a
sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of wood burned in
a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in. Our table
was of the puncheons cut from solid logs, and the next day they were the
floor of the new cabin."

Thomas Lincoln took his bride to live in a little log cabin in a
Kentucky settlement--not a village or hardly a hamlet--called
Elizabethtown. He evidently thought this place would be less lonesome
for his wife, while he was away hunting and carpentering, than the
lonely farm he had purchased in Hardin County, about fourteen miles
away. There was so little carpentering or cabinet making to do that he
could make a better living by farming or hunting. Thomas was very fond
of shooting and as he was a fine marksman he could provide game for the
table, and other things which are considered luxuries to-day, such as
furs and skins needed for the primitive wearing apparel of the
pioneers. A daughter was born to the young couple at Elizabethtown, whom
they named Sarah.

Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Nancy, lived near the Lincolns in the early
days of their married life, and gave Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson this
description of their early life together:

"Looks didn't count them days, nohow. It was stren'th an' work an'
daredevil. A lazy man or a co