In this desolate spot, a strange and unlikely place for the birth of one destined to play so memorable a part in the history of the world, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, Abraham Lincoln the President was born.
Of all the gross injustice ever done to the memory of woman, that which has been accorded to Nancy Hanks is the greatest.

The story which cast a shadow upon her parentage, and on that of her illustrious son as well, should be sternly relegated to the oblivion whence it came.

Mr.Henry Watterson, in his brilliant address on Lincoln, refers to him as "that strange, incomparable man, _of whose parentage we neither know nor care_." In some localities, particularly in Kentucky and South Carolina, the rumor is definite and persistent that the President was not the son of Thomas Lincoln, the illiterate and thriftless, but of one Colonel Hardin for whom Hardin County was named; that Nancy Hanks was herself the victim of unlegalized motherhood, the natural daughter of an aristocratic, wealthy, and well-educated Virginia planter, and that this accounted for many of her son's characteristics.

The story has long since been disproved.

Efforts to verify it brought forth the fact that it sprang into being in the early days of the Civil War and was evidently a fabrication born of the bitter spirit of the hour.
It was not from his father, however, that Lincoln inherited any of his remarkable traits.