Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace. This is the cabin where Abraham Lincoln may have been born. Some claim these are the original logs, taken down, refinished, and reassembled. Photo courtesy of PictureHistory

1. Abraham Lincoln was a true frontiersman – he was born in a log cabin, read by candlelight, and split rails.
True
False

TRUE. Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin, and lived in a log cabin for much of his youth. There is a log cabin currently standing at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in Hodgenville, KY, but it is most likely NOT the original structure. The cabin was razed and rebuilt many times – notably for a tour of fairs around the country in the late 1890s, where it is believed that some of the logs were mixed up with logs from the boyhood home of Jefferson Davis.

As for the popular image of Lincoln the Railsplitter, it is true. As a young man, Lincoln earned wages as a day laborer, and one of his many tasks was to split rails. At the Illinois Republican State convention in 1860, Lincoln’s cousin John Hanks presented two rails marked by a plaque reading “Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by Thos. Hanks and Abe Lincoln, whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County.” Lincoln admitted that while he didn’t know if he split those two rails in particular, he had split many rails in his lifetime.