Mordecai LincolnAge: 501686–1736
- Name
- Mordecai Lincoln
| Birth | 1686 |
| Birth of a son #1 | 1716 (Age 30) John Lincoln - son |
| Death of a wife | 1727 (Age 41) Hannah Salter - wife |
| Death | 1736 (Age 50) |
| Shared note | Abraham Lincoln Relationship to Richard Salter 1733-1865 , Berk County, PA Note: Richard Salter's connection to President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was that he was Abraham Lincoln's great-great-great grandfather. Richard Salter's daughter, Hannah (1692-1727) married Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736), their son, John (1716-1788), had a son named Abraham (1744-1786), who had a son named Thomas (1778-1851), who was the father of President Abraham Lincoln. ANNALS OF THE OLNEY VALLEY-LINCOLNS OF BERK COUNTY (MORDECAI LINCOLN AND HANNAH SALTER) THE LINCOLN HOMESTEAD The date of the erection of the Lincoln Homestead in Exeter (once Olney township), PA is put down by chroniclers as 1733. It is one of the few houses of Berk still standing that date back so far. It was built by Mordecai Lincoln of the fourth generation of the American line of Lincolns, whose forebears had immigrated from Norwich, England, as early as 1637 and settled at Hingham, Mass. Mordecai was an iron-worker who came into Pennsylvania from Monmouth county, New Jersey, in 1720 and first settled in Chester county and for a number of years was associated with Samuel Nutt and William Branson in the manufacture of iron on French Creek. In 1780 he purchased 1,000 acres of land in this portion of what is now Berks county-but then Lan caster-and soon thereafter began to erect his home. It i s claimed that the first building was but 16 by 30 1/2 feet in dimensions and that a part of the present building was since added to it . Here were reared his five children (JOHN*, Deborah, Mary, Anne, and Sarah) already born to him from a first wife-a Miss HANNAH SALTER-and here three more children (Mordecai, Thomas, and Abraham) were born of his second wife, Miss Mary Robeson. In May, 1736, Mordecai Lincoln died and the property descended to his widow and children. JOHN, a married son of his first wife, moved into the homestead and here was born his son, ABRAHAM*, who after, or about the time he reached his majority, treked with his parents and neighbors, the Hankses and Boones and numerous Pennsylvania German settlers of these parts and Lancaster and York counties in that flood of southern migration between 1760 and 1775, the outbreak of the Revolution, that soon filled the upper counties of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with as thick and characteristically Pennsylvania German a settlement as Eastern Pennsylvania itself. The Lincolns were carried along in 1765 and for a while settled in Rockingham county, where ABRAHAM in 1770 married a Pennsylvania-German girl, Bathsheba Herring, by name. Afterwards, he followed Daniel Boone westward and moved with his family to Kentucky, where he was killed by the Indians in 1786, when THOMAS*, his youngest son, the father of PRESIDENT LINCOLN, was but a lad of few years. BOONES THEIR NEIGHBORS. Miss Tarbell in her sketch of Lincoln's ancestors has this to say of the family while still settled in Berks County: " The Lincolns were not without neighbors. The most important of these were the Boones. I'here was George Boone, about Mordecai's age, with Deborah Howell, his wife, living with their 10 children not far away. There was Squire Boone, the father of Daniel with his big family. . . . The Lincoln and Boone children grew up together. One can see them racing back and forth over the fields and naturally enough, although Mor decai was not to live to see i t, as they grew older, falling in love. Mordecai's daughter, Sarah, was to marry a Boone, a nd his youngest son, Abraham, a daughter of that house." T here is every reason to believe that Mordecai Lincoln at once stepped into a good position in the country to which he had come. We find him a Justice of the Peace, an Inspector of highways. He was on an ascending scale socially and financially,when in 1736, at the age of 49 years, he died. Five months after his death, another son was born who was named Abraham who grew up to be an honored Berks countian. The eldest son, JOHN, by and by occupied the homestead and of him was born ABRAHAM , the grandfather of PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN. He was born in Berks County and in this Lincoln landmark, and here grew up, had his training and moulding influences in Berks, married a Pennsylvania-German girl (now Virginia-German); probably born in Berks, so that PRESIDENT LINCOLN had a good deal of Berks county influence and blood mixed in his make-up--enough indeed, to have enabled him to qualify as a member of the Pennsylvania German Society, had i t already existed in his day. ABRAHAM, POSTHUMOUS SON. Mordecai's posthumous son, Abraham, an uncle of the Abraham, who was also born in this house and later occupied it for 69 years and w as head of his own family. This Abraham was the man who remained in Berks when the other Lincolns migrated, and won here a name for community, leadership and states manship already alluded to. Prof. Learned of the Pennsylvania University has dug out the fact that it was this Lincoln of Berks who was chosen to make the address to Gen. Washington in Philadelphia, after the Revolutionary battles had been finally crowned with victory and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. Eighty years afterward, his namesake and kin of Springfield, IL, PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN, on his way to Washington, D.C., stopped at Philadelphia en route and at the same time Independence Hall, on Gen. Washington's birthday anniversary, made that ever memorable address that pictured and presaged the imminent outbreak of the Civil War. |