Lincoln, Abraham

Born: 1744-05-13 Berks County, Pennsylvania

Died: 1786-05 Louisville, Kentucky

Flourished:

Abraham Lincoln was the paternal grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln. Around 1766, Abraham moved with his family to Rockingham County, Virginia. In 1770, Abraham married Bathsheba (Bersheba) Herring, with whom he had five children, including Thomas, the president's father. He became a captain in the Virginia Militia. In 1773, Abraham acquired a 300-acre farm from his father along Linville Creek in Rockingham County. In 1774, he participated in Lord Dunmore's War against the Shawnee Indians, and during the American Revolution, he joined General Lachlan McIntosh's abortive expedition against Fort Detroit. In 1780, Abraham uprooted his family and moved to frontier Kentucky, settling on a large farm near what would become Louisville in Jefferson County. Kentucky remain a contested area during the Revolution, as Indians in the area resented encroachment on their hunting grounds. Abraham regularly received visits from unfriendly Indians, and in May 1786, he was ambushed and murdered as he tended his farm.

Gravestone, Long Run Cemetery, Eastwood, KY; Louis A. Warren, Lincoln's Parentage & Childhood (New York: Century, 1926), 3-9, 11, 12, 13, 172, 259, 266, 275, 283, 286; Abraham Lincoln to Solomon Lincoln; Waldo Lincoln, History of the Lincoln Family: An Account of the Descendants of Samuel Lincoln of Hingham Massachusetts, 1637-1920 (Worcester, MA: Commonwealth, 1923), 193-202; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 1:1-2.