Lincoln's Birthplace National Monument, KY...

The day after we visited Mammoth Caves, we took an hour drive north to visit (and do the Jr. Ranger program at) Lincoln’s Birthplace National Monument. There was a lovely visitor’s center where the kids picked up their Jr. Ranger books, and we found a little bumper sticker 🙂 .
The park has a reproduction room showing what Lincoln’s birthplace may have looked like when he was born…

I love the simplicity of it!

I thought the Jr. Ranger books here were adorable!

and the littles dug right in…

except Molly, who was more interested in the table of Lincoln Logs…

Once again, the visitor’s center was very well done, tho small. I always come to these type of parks expecting more than what the park is preserving. Here, I guess I expected to come and find a large museum that covered Abraham Lincoln’s entire life, but this location is his birthplace, so mostly covers just information about his few early years here.

There is a memorial here, with a large staircase leading up to it. There are 56 steps – one for each year of President Lincoln’s life.

Just to the left of the staircase in the above picture, is a natural, underground spring, which now has steps leading down to it. Abe would have probably been too small to fetch water from it, but he surely drank water from it. His family would have lived here from before his birth to when he was about 3 years old.

The little spring was beautiful, except for all the money that people had been throwing in it.

The weather here has been gorgeous, not too hot, not too cold. We enjoyed a walk around the beautifully kept grounds. Everything here is so green!

And there are beautiful flowers everywhere.

Inside the memorial is a reproduction of the cabin into which Abraham Lincoln was born. There was some controversy over whether this was the actual cabin that he was born into, but it ended up being that the cabin was actually built when Abe was 39 years old (and he never lived in it). It is more of a symbol – which you are not allowed to touch even tho it’s not the real thing…

Heading back down to the visitor’s center to turn in our Jr. Ranger books…

Caleb likes Kentucky…(and check out those big boy teeth!)

Peanut NEVER runs out of energy…

After visiting the birthplace, we drove a few miles down the road to the Boyhood Home of Abraham Lincoln (still part of the birthplace park, just different site). His family moved to this land after the dispute over his birthplace acreage meant that his father lost that land, and his family lived here for a couple of years before moving (to Ohio I think).
His home here is no longer standing; there was a farmhouse, but it looked much newer, and the ranger station was closed up, so no info there. I was too busy helping the girls look at the pretty flowers…

and catch caterpillars to read the plaques, so I couldn’t really tell you about his boyhood home 😉

It was pretty anyway.

You’d think we didn’t have caterpillars back home in Montana!

The kids earned their “Lincoln’s Birthplace” ranger badges, and we drove the hour back to the rv park. We made sure that our laundry was caught up (by the time it’s done drying, there is always more in the hampers tho!) before hitting the road the next morning.
Driving through Kentucky towards Missouri, we saw quite a few buggies – I didn’t even know there was Amish country around here. I would have loved to stop somewhere and pick up some Amish made jams!

But, we only had a few days to do a few more stops before picking up our boy (who we are now thoroughly enjoying!).

We loved Kentucky, and the RV park was great – we are hoping to spend some more time in the area. Funny, it seems that we find that we enjoy nearly every place that we visit, and wish that we could stay longer. Too much country, too little time. 🙂