[Footnote 1: By the law of primogeniture, which at that date was
still unrepealed in Virginia, the family estate went to Mordecai,
the eldest son.]
When Thomas Lincoln was about twenty-eight years old he married Nancy
Hanks, a niece of his employer, near Beechland, in Washington County.
She was a good-looking young woman of twenty-three, also from Virginia,
and so far superior to her husband in education that she could read and
write, and taught him how to sign his name. Neither one of the young
couple had any money or property; but in those days living was not
expensive, and they doubtless considered his trade a sufficient
provision for the future. He brought her to a little house in
Elizabethtown, where a daughter was born to them the following year.
During the next twelvemonth Thomas Lincoln either grew tired of his
carpenter work, or found the wages he was able to earn insufficient to
meet his growing household expenses. He therefore bought a little farm
on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in what was then Hardin and is now
La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville, and thirteen miles from
Elizabethtown. Having no means, he of course bought the place on credit,
a transaction not so difficult when we remember that in that early day
there was plenty of land to be bought for mere promises to pay; under
the disadvantage, however, that farms to be had on these terms were
usually of a very poor quality, on which energetic or forehanded men did
not care to waste their labor.
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