Memorial Building at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park

It can be said that the original Lincoln Memorial is located at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park. Built between 1909 and 1911, the neoclassical-styled memorial was finished three years before construction commenced on the more famous Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. The Memorial Building—as it is called to keep from confusing it with the Lincoln Memorial—sits above Sinking Spring on the spot where Abraham Lincoln’s birth cabin is thought to have been located. It is the centerpiece of the park.

In 1905, Robert Jones, editor of Collier’s Weekly magazine, purchased 100 acres of the original Sinking Spring Farm where Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Included in the sale was a cabin that was supposedly constructed with logs from the original Lincoln Family cabin. The following year, Jones formed the Lincoln Farm Association with a number of other prominent Americans, including Mark Twain. The organization proceeded to raise $100,000 for the Memorial Building, which would enclose the birth cabin and protect it from the elements. Jones had hoped to raise twice as much money for a larger building, but the amount raised was enough for a scaled-down version that could still hold the cabin. The cornerstone was laid on February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Construction continued through 1911, and the memorial was dedicated in November of that year and opened to the public. The Lincoln Farm Association then donated the land and memorial to the Federal Government.

In 1916, the Federal government officially created Abraham Lincoln National Park and placed it under the management of the U. S. War Department. It wasn’t until 1933 that the park was transferred to the National Park Service, and in 1939 it was designated as a National Historic Site. It was then that the National Park Service historians began to question the validity of the log cabin, though no official decision was made to denounce its authenticity.

In 1948, Lincoln scholar Roy Hays wrote an article that also questioned the cabin’s origins. His research had found that in both 1860 and 1865, two eyewitness reports, including one newspaper account, reported that no cabin or any remnants of a cabin were on the Sinking Spring Farm site. Further investigation revealed that a man name Alfred Dennett had purchased the farm in 1885 along with a neighboring cabin. He tried to drum up tourism to the site, but had no luck. Perhaps in an effort to salvage an investment, the cabin was passed off as authentic. However, even if it was, it was dismantled and shipped to a variety of exhibitions between 1897 and 1905. It was not uncommon for logs of various cabins to get mixed together, so by the time the Lincoln Farm Association bought the cabin its provenance was rather dubious. All of this was unknown to the Association when it had the memorial built around the cabin.

After the Hays article came out, the National Park Service reached the conclusion that authentic or not, there simply wasn’t any evidence at all that could document the cabin’s origin. In 2004, a tree ring study was done on the logs with results that dated the cabin to 1848. The story that the National Park Service passes off today is that the cabin came from a couple miles down the road and belonged to a man by the name of John Davenport. It is still inside the memorial, though it is now simply thought of as a representation of the type of cabin in which Lincoln grew up.

The Memorial Building is a short walk from the Birthplace Visitor Center, though the direct route is not handicap accessible. Visitors must take stairs down a small hill and eventually climb a staircase with another 52 stairs—one for each year of Lincoln’s life—to the memorial entrance.