If You Grew Up With Abraham Lincoln - Softcover

Girls helped their mothers wash, cook, and sew buckskin into shirts and pants. They helped spin, weave, and make soap. Even a five-year-old boy was big enough to help with the planting. He could drop pumpkin seeds between the hills of corn.

Abe did.

By the time Abe was seven, his father gave him an axe. Abe kept the woodbox filled with logs for the fire.

He cleaned out the ashes from the fireplace.

He picked berries, nuts and grapes in the woods.

When the Lincoln family moved to Indiana, there was more work to be done. Abe helped his father build the new log cabin.

There was no running water in a log cabin. Whenever the well went dry, Abe had to walk a mile to the nearest spring and had to carry water home.

He helped his father farm. He plowed. He planted. He weeded.

He chopped down trees. He split logs into rails for fences. People on the frontier said that a rail fence should be horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight. That meant it should be strong enough so a bull could not push it over. And it should be tight enough so a pig could not squeeze through it.