The Virginia Lincolns

[Belsnickel]

Just an interesting story from my area I thought I'd share: https://hburgcitizen.com/2019/12/09/meet-the-couple-preserving-abraham-lincolns-ancestral-home-and-its-complicated-history/

Quote:If you’ve driven north on Route 42 from Harrisonburg, you might have noticed a large farmhouse with fading yellow paint on the right side of the road in Linville, about halfway between Harrisonburg and Broadway. Or maybe you’ve caught a glimpse of a historical marker in the overgrown brush as well.

From the road, though, it looks like another neglected structure from an antiquated era, teetering on the brink of irrelevance or potentially in the early stages of its way to collapse. But this old house holds the roots of a U.S. president.

It also represents the complexities of the country’s history with slavery, as it was built by the ancestors of President Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation aimed to free enslaved people. At the same time, the farm relied on some of those very same slaves to run and maintain it — even while Lincoln was in the White House.

The property is called the Lincoln Homestead, and it was indeed purchased and lived on by the 16th president’s ancestors. Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was born at the homestead before moving west to the famous log cabin of the president’s birth in Kentucky. Later, while Abraham Lincoln was ascending to the presidency, then trying to hold together a country ripped apart in the Civil War, his cousins owned the farm.

There’s a graveyard on the north end of the property, with the name Lincoln on almost every marker. There’s another marker in the graveyard as well — that of two enslaved people who served the Lincoln family.

It definitely speaks to how complicated the stories are surrounding slavery in this country.