Indiana school was probably held five years before Gentryville was located and a store established there.  Until then it was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain books, slates, pencils, pen, ink, and paper, and their use was limited to settlers who had brought them when they came.  It is reasonable to infer that the Lincoln family had no such luxuries, and, as the Pigeon Creek settlement numbered only eight or ten families there must have been very few pupils to attend this first school.  Nevertheless, it is worthy of special note that even under such difficulties and limitations, the American thirst for education planted a school-house on the very forefront of every settlement.

Abraham’s second school in Indiana was held about the time he was fourteen years old, and the third in his seventeenth year.  By this time he probably had better teachers and increased facilities, though with the disadvantage of having to walk four or five miles to the school-house.  He learned to write, and was provided with pen, ink, and a copy-book, and probably a very limited supply of writing-paper, for facsimiles have been printed of several scraps and fragments upon which he had carefully copied tables, rules, and sums from his arithmetic, such as those of long measure, land measure, and dry measure, and examples in multiplication and compound division.  All this indicates that he pursued his studies with a very unusual purpose and determination, not only to understand them at the moment, but to imprint them indelibly upon his memory, and even to regain them in visible form for reference when the school-book might no longer be in his hands or possession.

Mr. Lincoln has himself written that these three different schools were “kept successively by Andrew Crawford, ——­ Swaney, and Azel W. Dorsey.”  Other witnesses state the succession somewhat differently.  The important fact to be gleaned from what we learn about Mr. Lincoln’s schooling is that the instruction given him by these five different teachers—­two in Kentucky and three in Indiana, in short sessions of attendance scattered over a period of nine years—­made up in all less than a twelvemonth.  He said of it in 1860, “Abraham now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year.”  This distribution of the tuition he received was doubtless an advantage.  Had it all been given him at his first school in Indiana, it would probably not have carried him half through Webster’s “Elementary Spelling Book.”  The lazy or indifferent pupils who were his schoolmates doubtless forgot what was taught them at one time before they had opportunity at another; but to the exceptional character of Abraham, these widely separated fragments of instruction were precious steps to self-help, of which he made unremitting use.