Little Pigeon Creek Community
[7] Among the farms were a church, general store and post office, schools,[8] and Noah Gordon's mill,[2][8]: 5 which ground corn.
[8]: 5 The church's cemetery, dating back to 1825, is the gravesite of the community's settlers, including Abraham's sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby.
In its early days the settlers worked and supported one another, but there was also immoral, drunken, thieving, and superstitious behavior.
[12] Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, with their children Sarah and Abraham, moved to the Little Pigeon Creek settlement in the winter of 1816.
[1]: 426 The Lincolns lived in a half-faced camp or poleshed[5]: 20 [d] and ate wild game, corn and pork until they built a log house and began to farm the land in 1817.
[4] Late in 1817, the Lincolns were joined by Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow, who had raised Nancy,[12][5]: 22 and Dennis Hanks, Abraham's cousin, from Kentucky.
[4] Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow died of milk sickness a few weeks before Nancy's death and they are all buried together.
[5]: 22 Late the following year Thomas married Sarah Bush Lincoln, a widow from Kentucky who had three children.
He sold and bartered merchandise and shipped farmer's grain, tobacco, hides, pork, venison, and beef to New Orleans on flatboats.
The Jones Home represents those successful entrepreneurs who stayed in Southern Indiana instead of moving further west.
[8] Jones was elected in 1838 to the Indiana General Assembly, where he supported internal improvements and economic development[8] and served until 1841.
[8][17] The area and the creek were named for the breeding ground of southern Indiana passenger pigeons, now extinct.
They had been so great in number that they "literally formed clouds, and floated through the air in a frequent succession of these as far as the eye could reach, sometimes causing a sensible gust of wind, and a considerable motion of the trees over which they flew."
John James Audubon observed, "Multitudes are seen, sometimes in groups, at the estimate of a hundred and sixty-three flocks in 21 minutes.
The noonday light is then darkened as by an eclipse, and the air filled with the dreamy buzzing of their wings.
