A Lincoln Peculiarity

In 1912, an elderly man in the sunset of his life wrote a letter to his grandson to share a memory he had of his old friend, Abraham Lincoln. 

Wiggo Scherr, a Danish immigrant who worked as a clerk at the general store in Springfield, Illinois, saw Abraham Lincoln almost daily as the future President’s law office was just a few blocks away. The store’s owner, Mr. Lamb, had once been Lincoln’s client, and the pair remained friends. The store not only supplied an abundance of goods to the townspeople, it was a place where merchants and businessmen gathered on a regular basis. And Abraham Lincoln was often among them.

“When not too busy or absent on the circuit, he was almost daily in our store,” Scherr wrote, “hence [we] got to be familiar with him, a jovial, full of fun man, a heap of jokes.” He added, “there are too many of his peculiarities for me to write, but one [thing] he had a penchant for was whittling…if he could get a piece of soft pine, out came his knife and at it he went.”¹

One incident of Lincoln’s whittling provided an indelible memory for Mr. Scherr. After receiving a number of pine boxes from New York, the clerks emptied their contents and then prepared the cartons for resale. Farmers desired them for storing grain. These large boxes sold for $1.25, a significant price in those days.

“Lincoln came,” Scherr recalled, “and stood on the pavement in front of the store. We took off the lids carefully, and only tacked them on, leaving a small crack. He passed the time of day, [asking] 'How goes it, boys?' and throwing himself at length, hip and elbow, on the left side of the box. The crack was too enticing. Out came the knife, chip came off the side of the lid, I told the two fellow clerks, 'Keep still, let’s see what he’ll do.'”²

Lincoln seemed to be in another world as he began to whittle the piece, talking as he worked.

“Slap went a chip off the other side,” the clerk continued. “He told us some of his yarns until he had a hole cut into which one could almost put a good size baby head. I then exclaimed, ‘Oh! Mr. Lincoln, look what you’ve done to our box.’ He seemed entirely oblivious to what he’d done.”³

Feeling a bit remorseful for ruining the lid, Lincoln asked, “Boys, what do you do with these boxes?” They replied that they were sold for storing grain. Lincoln told them to charge the box to his account. Scherr replied, “I guess we won’t do that. We can get a dollar anyhow and you have entertained us enough for the difference.”⁴

Wooden furniture in state buildings, especially in the prairie states, often fell victim to men like Lincoln in the mid-nineteenth century. Whittling was a popular pastime, as men shaped them into interesting pieces of art. Since there was no Federal funding for furnishings at the time, state employees had to utilize whatever old furniture they could obtain. They were often donations of second-hand pieces. Already cracked and worn, the furnishings were ripe for the picking. Whittlers like Lincoln easily rendered them more broken down than they were beforehand.

Abraham Lincoln started whittling as a small child. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a talented cabinet maker, fashioning furnishings of all types for settlers in midwest. There was an abundance of leftover wood, and Abraham often whittled the smaller pieces to aid his father in the mechanisms of his creations.

It has been documented that when Lincoln’s mother died of milk sickness in 1818, Abraham, just nine years old, was required to help his father fashion her coffin – a common necessity for people in rustic settlements. Dennis Hanks, a cousin, later alluded to the difficulties of the prairie life by saying, “Tom was always makin’ a coffin for someone.”⁵

In creating his mother’s casket, Abraham’s particular job was to whittle the small cogs from pine to hold together the wooden slats. He then had to help his father place his mother inside, seal the coffin, haul her body to the burial site, help dig the grave, and place her in the ground. 

It was a terrible chore indeed for a nine-year-old boy.

By the time Lincoln was passing the time at Mr. Lamb’s store, he had been an expert at whittling for three decades.

The loss of his mother, however, took its toll. “He never got over the miserable way his mother died,” Dennis Hanks remembered. Helping to finish her coffin was one of the final services he was able to accomplish for her.⁶

Lincoln never wanted to talk about his early years. To the journalist John Scripps he simply described his childhood as “the short and simple annals of the poor.”⁷

He once told a nurse at a Union hospital in 1862 a memory of his mother. “I remember her prayers. And they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”⁸

He told his law partner, William Herndon, “God bless my angel mother. All that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.”⁹

It is not surprising then, that at Mr. Lamb’s Springfield general store, Abraham Lincoln continued his whittling skills as he entertained – and perhaps annoyed – some onlookers with his habit of taking a piece of pine and creating something small and useful.

It is one of his many peculiarities, another piece of the puzzle that makes up our 16^th President.

Sources: Atkinson, Eleanor. The Boyhood of Abraham Lincoln. New York: McClure Company, 1912. Herndon, William H. and Jesse W. Weik. Herndon’s Lincoln. Urbana and Chicago, IL: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, University of Illinois Press, 2006. Letter, Wiggo T. Scherr to his grandson, Elliott, 1912. Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL. Miller, Richard Lawrence. Lincoln and His World. The Early Years: Birth to Illinois. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2004.

End Notes: 

1. Letter, Wiggo Scherr to Elliott, 1912. Lincoln, Presidential Library, Springfield, IL. 

2. Ibid. 

3. Ibid. 

4. Ibid. 

5. Atkinson, pp. 16-17. 

6. Ibid. 

7. Herndon, p. 15. 

8. Miller, p. 28. 

9. Herndon, p. 16.

Author’s Note: Wiggo T. Scherr (1825-1912) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He immigrated to the United States at age four, coming with his parents. He grew up in Philadelphia and later moved to New Orleans before settling in Springfield, Illinois as a young man. He married Mary Brown in Springfield. The couple had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood. During the war, he worked in the Commissary Department and was known to have visited Lincoln in the White House at least on one occasion. After the war, he lived in Nebraska and St. Louis. He died in Nebraska on October 13, 1912, at the age of 86. His body was returned to Springfield in 1913 for burial, and his grave is not far from that of his whittling friend, Abraham Lincoln.