Pioneer Cemetery at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial

The Pioneer Cemetery at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial is where Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and other members of the Little Pigeon Creek Community are buried. The cemetery is located at the opposite end of the allée—the long, grass field flanked by the forest on either side and with a flagpole at one end—from the Visitor Center. A marker at the start of the allée reads, “You are facing the wooded knoll on which sleeps Nancy Hanks Lincoln mother of the president who lived in this Hoosier environment during the formative years of his life from 1816 to 1830. Beyond to the north, is marked the site of the humble log cabin where she led him for a little while along the path to greatness.”

The allée across the street from the Visitor Center at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial

Nancy Lincoln died on October 5, 1818, from what is known as milk sickness—a disease caused by drinking tainted milk. Though the cause was unknown at the time of her death, farmers in the 1820s deduced that the illness was due to drinking the milk of cows that had consumed some sort of poison, most likely from water, but nobody knew for sure. The adult cows typically didn’t die (though they could), but calves that drank their mother’s milk often did. In humans, the disease causes severe vomiting, trembling, loss of muscle coordination, and stupor. As with any food-borne disease, not everyone dies.

In the mid-1830s, a midwife from southern Illinois named Anna Pierce was tipped off by a Shawnee women who knew a lot about plants in the area that the poison came from the cows eating the weed white snakeroot. Her observations confirmed this, but because she was a woman and from a rural area, her discovery was not published in medical journals. Instead, her advice only traveled slowly by word of mouth. It wasn’t until the end of the century that milk sickness became less common, and not until 1927 that the USDA published a definitive study linking the toxin tremetol in white snakeroot to the disease.

Nancy Lincoln was buried in what is now called the Pioneer Cemetery, and many of the people buried there died around the same time also from milk sickness. A few years prior, the Little Pigeon Primitive Baptist Church was established, and by 1825 it had a cemetery where most burials where now being held (Abraham’s sister Sarah was buried there in 1828). As a result, the Pioneer Cemetery was eventually forgotten. Many graves were only marked with field stones to begin with, and wooden markers once etched with a name had rotted away. Many of the inscribed stone markers were moved or destroyed.

Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 stirred up a lot of interest in his past life and places he was once associated with. When people came to where he was born, they were shocked to learn that the cemetery where his own mother had been buried was now overgrown and that her grave was no longer marked. A Civil War veteran visited the cemetery in November 1868 and ended up writing a poem about it that was published in the Rockport Journal (Rockport is about 20 miles south of Lincoln City). This shamed the town into finding the grave and providing a new tombstone for Nancy, but it wasn’t until 1874 that a marker was placed within the known area of the cemetery. It was eventually stolen by souvenir hunters.

By 1879, the Pioneer Cemetery was once again a mess. Another newspaper article came out about its current condition, and once again there was interest in maintaining the site. Ol’ timers to the area were consulted about the location of the grave. One man who attended the funeral pointed out the spot. He was five years old in 1818, and his mother had died around the same time from milk sickness and was supposedly buried next to Nancy. Is it possible that a five-year-old could remember the exact location 60 years later? Regardless, a new tombstone provided by Peter Studebaker of the Studebaker Carriage Company was placed on the spot, and this became the traditional location for Nancy Lincoln’s grave. While she may not be six feet below the Studebaker tombstone, which still stands today, she is most likely buried somewhere within the Pioneer Cemetery boundary.

Tombstone for Nancy Lincoln in the Pioneer Cemetery at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial

For the next three decades, the Pioneer Cemetery went through many cycles of dilapidation and renewal as funding and interest came and went. It wasn’t until 1925 that it came under perpetual care from the Indiana Department of Conservation, and ultimately the National Park Service when Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial was established in 1962.