Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 2 Child of the Frontier Part 2

Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 2 Child of the Frontier Part 2

house-raising. Like the Lincolns, the Sparrows had been driven from Kentucky by an ejectment suit due to prior claims on their land. In September 1818, the Sparrows died of milk sickness, caused by drinking milk from cows that eat the poisonous white snakeroot. Even greater tragedy for Abe came when the same illness took the life of his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who died on October 5 at thirty-four. Nancy suffered from the debilitating effects of milk sickness—trembling, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Aware that she was dying, she called Abe and his sister to her side and told them to revere God and to be good to their father and to each other. 20  Thomas Lincoln placed her body in a plain coffin he had built and buried it without a marker on a knoll near the Pigeon Creek cabin. After Nancy’s death, Dennis Hanks moved into the Lincoln cabin, where he and Abe, ten years his junior, slept in a small loft reached by climbing wooden pegs. Within a year Thomas took a trip back to Elizabethto…