The Storykeepers

A tradition is not carried by a county; it is carried by particular people who write things down. This page describes the writers and collectors whose published work built the North Carolina Lincoln account — each of them by their documented role and publications, and nothing further.

A note on what this page is not

This is a page about authorship, not about any organisation. It does not list the officers, trustees, volunteers or staff of any body, past or present. Where a person appears below it is because they published a book, wrote a play, or placed a research collection in the public domain — public acts that are properly part of a bibliography. Living people are described only in terms of that public work.

James H. Cathey

Author of The Genesis of Lincoln (1899), the earliest sustained written version of the North Carolina claim. Cathey worked chiefly in the western mountain counties, gathering recollections about the Enloe household from people who were themselves recalling events at second or third hand. Whatever one concludes about the story, Cathey's book is the tradition's primary document: strip it out and most of the subsequent literature has nothing to stand on.

James Caswell Coggins

Author of Abraham Lincoln: A North Carolinian, with Proof (1926) and The Eugenics of President Lincoln (1940). Coggins was the tradition's most emphatic advocate and gave it the confident vocabulary it has used ever since. The 1940 book, as noted in the bibliography, argues from eugenic theories of inherited character; it should be read as a document of its period's racial science rather than as evidence about Lincoln, and this archive flags it every time it is cited.

Jerry A. Goodnight and Richard Eller

Co-authors of The Tarheel Lincoln: North Carolina Origins of “Honest” Abe (2003), the best-known modern treatment, and — in Goodnight's case — of a further study of regional Lincoln legends published in 2008. Their contribution was to treat the material as folklore with a history, to lay out the competing candidate fathers side by side rather than championing one, and to ask why the story survived. That framing is closer to how this archive approaches the subject than anything else in the literature.

Don Norris

Author of Abraham Enloe of Western North Carolina (2008), a genealogical study of the Enloe family. Its value lies in separating two things that the tradition habitually merges: the documented life of a real and traceable landholding family, and the undocumented claim attached to it.

The playwright

A Rutherford County playwright wrote two works drawing on the legend — one produced by the county arts council's readers theatre in 1987, another staged by a community theatre in 2005 and again in 2012. More significantly for researchers, he assembled over twenty years of material on the various North Carolina Lincoln legends and placed it with a local collection so it would remain available. He organised it by claimed father — Enloe, Martin, Calhoun, Springs — and that act of organisation is itself a scholarly contribution, because it makes visible that the county was host to several competing legends rather than one.

The local collectors

Behind the published names is a longer line of people who did the unglamorous part: taping interviews with elderly neighbours, keeping clippings, marking the location of a foundation on a hillside, and repeating a story carefully enough that it survived to be written down. One such figure, remembered locally as the keeper of the story and long since deceased, spent a lifetime gathering what he could about the traditional birthplace and passed his collected material on rather than letting it disperse. An artist later worked with that material to paint a conjectural reconstruction of the cabin.

It is worth being clear about what such work is and is not. Recording an oral tradition faithfully is a genuine service to history, and the people who did it deserve to be named as collectors. But a careful recording of what people remember does not become documentary evidence of what happened, however careful the recording — and a painted reconstruction, however skilful, is an illustration of a belief, not a picture of a building.

The sceptics within

The tradition has also had honest critics inside its own tent, and they are the figures most worth remembering. The physician who spent years tracing candidate descendants for a genetic comparison told a sympathetic audience in 2007 that he had found no proof and knew of no method of proof except DNA — a sentence set out in full on the page about the 2007 forum. Historians who attended local productions and wrote about the legend have generally been careful to describe it as legend. The tradition has rarely been damaged by outsiders; where it has been checked, it has usually been checked from within.