skets or large trays. He was uneducated,
illiterate, content with living from hand to mouth. His death occurred
on the fifteenth day of January, 1851. He was buried in a neighboring
country graveyard, about a mile north of Janesville, Coles County. There
was nothing to mark the place of his burial until February, 1861, when
Abraham Lincoln paid a last visit to his grave just before he left
Springfield for Washington. On a piece of oak board he cut the letters
T.L. and placed it at the head of the grave. It was carried away by some
relic-hunter, and the place remained as before, with nothing to mark it,
until the spring of 1876. Then the writer, fearing that the grave of
Lincoln's father would become entirely unknown, succeeded in awakening
public opinion on the subject. Soon afterward a marble shaft twelve feet
high was erected, bearing on its western face this inscription:

THOMAS LINCOLN
FATHER OF
THE MARTYRED PRESIDENT.
BORN
JAN. 6th, 1778
DIED
JAN. 15th, 1851.
LINCOLN.

"And now," concluded Mr. Balch, "I have given all that can be known of
Thomas Lincoln. I have written impartially and with a strict regard to
facts which can be substantiated by many of the old settlers in this
county. Thomas Lincoln was a harmless and honest man. Beyond this, one
will search in vain for any ancestral clue to the greatness of Abraham
Lincoln."

After reaching the new home in Illinois, young Lincoln worked with his
father until things were in shape for comfortable living. He helped to
build the log cabin, break up the new land and fence it in, splitting
the rails with his own hands. It was these very rails over which so much
sentiment was expended years afterward at an important epoch in
Lincoln's political career. During the sitting of the State Convention
at Decatur, a banner attached to two of these rails and bearing an
appropriate inscription was brought into the assemblage and formally
presented to that body amid a scene of unparalleled enthusiasm. After
that they were in demand in every State of the Union in which free labor
was honored. They were borne in processions by the people, and hailed by
hundreds of thousands as a symbol of triumph and a glorious vindication
of freedom and of the right and dignity of labor. These, however, were
not the first rails made by Lincoln. He was a practiced hand at the
business. As a memento of his pioneer accomplishment he preserved in
later years a cane