“God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” So said Abraham Lincoln of his beloved mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, whom he lost to milk sickness—she drank milk from a cow who’d grazed on white snakeroot, it’s poisonous—when she was 34 and her son age nine, old enough to help his father plane pine boards and carve wooden pegs to make the coffin they buried her in. She died two weeks after drinking the blighted milk, as did several others in their village of Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana. It was October 5, 1818. Dennis Hanks, Nancy’s cousin, paints the death scene: Nancy called Abraham and his sister Sarah to her bedside and asked them “to be good and kind to their father, to each other, and to the world.”
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:55:10 +0000
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