One woman's monument to Lincoln

Tucked behind the magnificent Greek Revival mansion of the Forbes House Museum in Milton is an exact replica of the log cabin in Hardin County, Ky., where the 16th president was born. Mary Bowditch Forbes, the last member of the Forbes family to live in the mansion, built the one-room cabin in the 1920s to house her collection of artifacts and memorabilia related to Lincoln and the Civil War.

Forbes's voluminous compilation began with, of all things, a simple one-cent piece minted in 1909 for the centennial of Lincoln's birth. It would be worth a penny for Forbes's thoughts to learn why that coin sparked a passion to collect Lincolniana. For the better part of the next 50 years, she collected more than 1,000 items and filled numerous scrapbooks with newspaper clippings.

Forbes's collection ranges from the pedestrian (photographs of Union troops) to the quirky (an 1860 Lincoln campaign hat in the shape of a coffee pot) to the macabre (a life mask of the president's face and a mold of his hand). A fair number of items are related to Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, such as a shawl worn by Mary Todd Lincoln that fateful night in Ford's Theater, a cloth star from Lincoln's coffin, and a piece of the rope used to hang conspirators. Other highlights include a set of original Lincoln signatures, paintings of Civil War battle scenes, and a first edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Forbes's growing collection quickly began to pose a storage problem, so she came up with an inspired solution. She commissioned Thomas Murdock, a local carpenter, to build her a replica of Lincoln's rustic birthplace.

Murdock drove to Kentucky to research the cabin's measurements and gather indigenous materials for its construction. While trees harvested from the nearby Blue Hills were used to build the cabin, clay from the land on which the original cabin stood in what is now Hodgenville, was used to make the mortar, and saplings from the area near Lincoln's first home were transplanted to the Milton estate.