Lincoln Farm Association

Quick Facts

The centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in 1909 prompted people throughout Kentucky and the country to begin planning local and national celebrations. The United States Postal Service planned a release of 100 million 2 cent stamps with Lincoln’s picture on them. The United States Mint was designing a new penny that was to be the first U.S. coin to have a presidential likeness on it and a newly formed, nonprofit group, the Lincoln Farm Association, decided to create a memorial on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky, where Lincoln was born. Writers Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Ida Mae Tarbell; Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor; presidential candidates William H. Taft and William J. Bryan as well as local Kentucky notable Col. Henry Watterson of Louisville were members of the Lincoln Farm Association.

The group purchased 110 acres of the original farm where the 16th president was born and the logs identified by some local residents as coming from the original Lincoln birth cabin. The association desired to construct a national memorial to Abraham Lincoln at a time when public interest was growing in preserving and protecting important aspects of cultural and environmental heritage. Through fund-raiding effort, the Lincoln Farm Association received donations totaling more than $350,000. Prominent architect John Russell Pope (future architect of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.) was hired to design a memorial building to enshrine the Lincoln birth cabin. Samuel Clemens expressed the feelings of the group in a 1907 editorial for the New York Times “his birthplace [was] worth saving.”