Is the cabin enshrined within the Memorial Building the original Lincoln family cabin?
No the Lincoln Farm Association, the State of Kentucky, and the War Department all believed the cabin within the Memorial Building was the actual birthplace of Lincoln. It was only during the late 1940s and early 1950s after the cabin had passed to the National Park Service (in 1933) that questions about the cabin authenticity came to light. The resulting studies by the National Park Service determined that the cabin was not the original cabin. It is a “symbolic cabin” on the original land. In 2004, a dendrochronologist from the University of Tennessee was asked to conduct a research on the authenticity of the cabin by aging the logs. This was accomplished by core sampling the oldest logs. The sampling determined that the oldest log in the cabin dates to 1848. This indicates that the cabin enshrined in the Memorial was constructed later than 1848. Dwight Pitcaithley, Historian for the National Park Service was on site to represent the Park Service. This core sampling confirms that the
