The old house is only a memory, but the ghosts of a man and a maid – and a boy who became president – are still around to haunt historians. To those who knew the house, it was a part of the story of Abraham Lincoln and the myths that have grown out of his obscure boyhood.
For it was here in the Great Smokies, according to tradition that the story of the great American folk hero had its beginning. Some folks have argued that Abraham Lincoln was born, the son of a prosperous, prominent pioneer.
There is no argument that Nancy Hanks, his mother, lived in the house as a servant, leaving under a cloud of speculation and gossip to go to Kentucky where she married Tom Lincoln. For more than a hundred years a heap of folks have insisted that Abraham Enloe, in whose house Nancy Hanks was a servant, was the real father of the great American Civil War president.
The tradition that Lincoln was his illegitimate son has persisted down through the years. The folks who grew up with it are dead. So is the man who dared chronicle it for prosperity. Time was when the story was good country store gossip and warmed over in the chimney corner after the children had been put to bed. Like so much of the mountain folklore, the Lincoln tradition would now be only a vague sketch to tease the memory if the late James H. Cathey had not come along.
Cathey worked for years in documenting the tradition. And he spent his own money to finance publication of a book on it because he was convinced that Enloe was the father of Lincoln. An author and one-time representative in the State Legislature, Cathey wrapped up the tradition of Lincoln’s birth in a volume called “The Genesis of Lincoln or Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.” It was first published in 1899.
The tradition as related by Cathey – and documented by dozens of letters and affidavits – is that Enloe was Lincoln’s father by Nancy Hanks, a servant girl in the Enloe household. According to Cathey, Nancy Hanks, at the age of eight, came to work for Enloe while he was still living in Rutherford County. When several years later he migrated to the Smokies, she was brought along.
Soon after moving here, Enloe became entangled with her and it was soon obvious that Nancy Hanks was going to have a baby. There followed a family quarrel and Mrs. Enloe insisted that the girl leave. Several persons quoted by Cathey claimed that the child was born in the Enloe household. Others insisted it was born in Haywood County, north of Waynesville, at the home of Felix Walker. But they all agreed that Enloe paid Tom Lincoln to take Nancy Hanks and her child to Kentucky.
“Confident and persistent have the keepers of this old testimony to the origin of Abraham Lincoln been, when plied with questions, that there is no opening for superstition,” Cathey wrote, “and the most one was inclined to be skeptical could do was wonder and say nothing.”
“One might hug his incredulity by imagining that the people who gathered the strange accounts of Nancy Hanks and Abraham Enloe and a child, and the wonderful story of the striking personal likeness of Abraham Lincoln and Wesley Enloe (a son of Abraham Enloe), are illiterate, fanatical folk who have conjured up a fragmentary fable…but this incredulity is all cleared when one learns that the custodians of the Lincoln tradition are numbered by the scores and hundreds of the first people of Western North Carolina.”
Cathey, in a statement from Wesley Enloe, quoted the son of Abraham Enloe as saying:
“I was born after the incident between father and Nancy Hanks. I have, however, a vivid recollection of hearing the name Nancy Hanks frequently mentioned in the family while I was a boy. No, I never heard my father mention it. Nancy Hanks lived in my father’s family. I have no doubt the cause of my father’s sending her to Kentucky is the one generally alleged. The occurrence as understood by my generation and given to them by that of my father’s, I have no doubt is essentially true.”