Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial: The Ground Beneath Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Years

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial lies in Lincoln City, Spencer County, Indiana, about 56 km (35 mi) northeast of Evansville. The National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas — part of its Geologic Resources Inventory — gathers what is known about the memorial's rocks, soils and landforms, for teaching, geoconservation and managing living and non-living resources together.

Image from the National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas page for Lincoln Boyhood

The memorial

• Authorized on February 19, 1962, to preserve and interpret the place tied to the boyhood and family of President Abraham Lincoln.
• It commemorates his formative years from age 7 to 21, and includes the Lincoln family farm owned by his father, Thomas Lincoln, and the grave of his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln.
• After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, the Indiana home site became a place to honor both him and his mother. Nothing of the farm survived above ground, but in the late 19th century local people began building an informal memorial there — today a mix of formal and informal commemorative landscapes.

The rocks

The memorial lies in the Boonville Hills section of the Interior Low Plateaus province: Pennsylvanian bedrock with moderate relief.

The memorial shares its geologic history and characteristic formations with the wider Interior Low Plateaus region.

Image from the National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas page for Lincoln Boyhood

Maps and inventories

The Geologic Resources Inventory makes digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks — a scoping summary, GIS map data, a report on the park's geology and management issues, and a poster — and a Soil Resources Inventory for Lincoln Boyhood is complete. Both are on the NPS DataStore.

Sources

Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, Indiana," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.