Lincoln's boyhood years spent in Ind.

SPENCER COUNTY, Ind. (WISH) - Abraham Lincoln was born 200 years ago this week, and Indiana is one of several states celebrating. Lincoln was born in Kentucky and he gained fame in Illinois, but he spent many of his most critical years in Indiana.

Lincoln's Hoosier years started in 1816 in what was then an unnamed and untamed spot in a brand-new state. It's now Lincoln City in Spencer County and home to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial.

"A lot of the folks we get just come in off the interstate. Don't know we're here, don't know what we're about, don't know anything else," said Mike Capps, park ranger.

Capps eagerly welcomes visitors who do find their way to the park. He said the facility averages 150,000 visitors a year. Capps and the rest of the staff tackle the challenging task of teaching people about a time in Lincoln's life that is almost completely undocumented.

"It's a challenge sometimes to fill in the blanks," Capps said. "We do say things like 'may have' and 'perhaps' and 'as far as we know', which are in a sense qualifiers. But there's a legitimate reason we're doing that. There just isn't a lot of hard evidence for this time period."

Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died in Spencer County, and her body rests on a hilltop near the current Visitors' Center, but the grave marker was placed much later on a site that's at best a guess.

Lincoln's family farmed the land and lived in a small cabin much like replicas that stand on the property now, but the shape and locations of those are just approximations of the original buildings, which nature reclaimed long ago.

Historians are nearly certain of the original location of one cabin Lincoln helped build just before his family left Indiana. That site is now marked with a bronze sculpture of a fireplace and the outline of a cabin.

The difficulty of recreating Lincoln's anonymous early years stands in sharp contrast to his later life, when he became one of the most recognizable people in the world.

So, while America has countless pictures of Lincoln as President it must largely "imagine" him as a child, not that anyone at the Boyhood Memorial seem to mind. They're hoping all the current attention to Lincoln's well-documented adulthood will spark curiosity about his largely anonymous boyhood.

Capps said, "There are a lot of people who are asking questions and wanting to know more that perhaps wouldn't have been doing that, had it not been for the interest that's going on right now."