In this new
home the family spent four years more, and while here Abraham and his
sister Sarah began going to A B C schools. Their first teacher was
Zachariah Riney, who taught near the Lincoln cabin; the next, Caleb
Hazel, at a distance of about four miles.
Thomas Lincoln was evidently one of those easy-going, good-natured men
who carry the virtue of contentment to an extreme. He appears never to
have exerted himself much beyond the attainment of a necessary
subsistence. By a little farming and occasional jobs at his trade, he
seems to have supplied his family with food and clothes. There is no
record that he made any payment on either of his farms. The fever of
westward emigration was in the air, and, listening to glowing accounts
of rich lands and newer settlements in Indiana, he had neither valuable
possessions nor cheerful associations to restrain the natural impulse of
every frontiersman to "move." In this determination his carpenter's
skill served him a good purpose, and made the enterprise not only
feasible but reasonably cheap. In the fall of 1816 he built himself a
small flatboat, which he launched at the mouth of Knob Creek, half a
mile from his cabin, on the waters of the Rolling Fork. This stream
would float him to Salt River, and Salt River to the Ohio.
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