Bostic, North Carolina: Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln?

Found a curious item on the CharlotteObserver.com site about Bostic: a small town an hour's drive west of Charlotte here in North Carolina. Longstanding local folklore has it that Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin atop what is now a tree-covered hill in this Rutherford County community, and not in Kentucky as the history books say. There is even the Bostic Lincoln Center: a small museum dedicated to the legend (which is not without its own supposed body of evidence). Either of the links will tell you more about the allegation, which is rife with all sorts of old-fashioned nineteenth-century ribaldry!

Hmmmm... fascinating, on numerous levels. I'm not saying that I do believe there's an iota of credence to the claim though (which Geoff Elliott of The Abraham Lincoln Blog describes as "bad history" and calls the Bostic Lincoln Center "one of the worst examples I've yet seen").

But I also know that history is never as clean and cut as the books make it out to be. Real life is a messier affair than most published chronicles. After all, we are talking about nothing more or less than people. So who knows?

Just gonna file this one away as a odd anecdote about the life of Lincoln, and pass this along for your perusal :-)

Categories: abraham lincoln, bostic, history, north carolina