Lincoln Homestead
Exeter Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
President Lincoln's great-great grand-father Mordecai purchased Andrew Robeson's land and built the stone house that stands about 1 1/4 miles south of here in 1733. Mordecai Lincoln served as Justice of the Peace of Philadelphia County from 1733 to 1736, and was a friend and colleague of George Boone Jr., uncle of the pioneer Daniel Boone. Abraham Lincoln referred to his ancestors from Berks County, Pennsylvania in letters.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1733 Mordecai Lincoln—great-great-grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln—bought land in Exeter Township and built a stone house that still stands a little over a mile south of here. He served as a Berks County justice of the peace and moved in the same circle as the Boone family, being a friend of George Boone Jr., uncle of the pioneer Daniel Boone. Generations later, Lincoln himself wrote of his forebears from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Why it matters
This colonial homestead roots the ancestry of America's sixteenth president in Pennsylvania soil, one strand of the migrating families who built the young country.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To stand in Exeter Township in the 1730s was to stand at the leading edge of colonial Pennsylvania. William Penn's colony was still young, and its promise of cheap land and religious tolerance was drawing a remarkable mix of settlers up the Schuylkill Valley — English Quakers, German farmers, and Welsh families all pushing into Berks County's rolling farmland.
This was a frontier of a particular kind: not wilderness exactly, but the busy, hopeful edge of settlement, where a man with ambition and a little capital could buy good ground, build in stone rather than log, and found a family line meant to last. Land here changed hands quickly as older tracts were subdivided and sold on.
Into that world came Mordecai Lincoln, who purchased a piece of Andrew Robeson's holdings and, in 1733, raised a stone house sturdy enough that it still stands a little over a mile from this spot. Building in stone was a statement — a wager that this valley was where a family would stay.
People & events
The man at the center of this story is Mordecai Lincoln, the great-great-grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln. He was no mere subsistence farmer. In the very year he built his stone house he took up the office of Justice of the Peace for Philadelphia County, a post he held into the mid-1730s — a role that made him a keeper of local order, a settler of disputes, and a figure of standing among his neighbors.
He kept good company, too. Mordecai was a friend and colleague of George Boone Jr., whose family would become far more famous through a nephew, the pioneer Daniel Boone. The Boones were Berks County people in these years, and it is a quiet pleasure of American history that the ancestors of a great president and the kin of a legendary frontiersman lived and worked within the same small circle.
Generations and hundreds of miles later, Abraham Lincoln himself remembered where his family had come from. In his letters he reached back to these Berks County forebears — a reminder that even a man born in a Kentucky cabin carried the memory of Pennsylvania stone in his family story.
Its place in the American story
America's presidents did not spring from nowhere. Behind each one stretches a chain of ordinary migrating families, and the Lincoln line is one of the clearest examples. The path that ends at a log cabin in Kentucky and a White House in wartime Washington begins, in part, right here on the Pennsylvania land Mordecai Lincoln chose.
That migratory restlessness — from Pennsylvania onward and westward across the generations — is the American story in miniature. Families put down roots, built in stone, and then sent their children farther out toward the next frontier. The Lincolns were part of that long human current before the nation they would one day help preserve even existed.
What makes this homestead matter is not that it was grand, but that it was a beginning. A colonial justice of the peace laying a stone foundation in 1733 could not have imagined that his line would one day produce the man who held the Union together — yet the thread runs unbroken from this ground to that.
If you visit
Come here for the pleasure of standing at a source. The marker points you toward the stone house that survives a little over a mile to the south — look for that early, solid colonial masonry, the kind built to outlast its builder, and consider that these are among the oldest walls with a direct tie to a Lincoln.
Let the setting do its work. This is gentle Berks County farm country, and it rewards an unhurried visit: quiet roads, old fieldstone, the sense of a landscape that has been farmed for nearly three centuries. It is easy to picture the busy frontier valley this once was.
If you're building a road trip around America's presidential roots, this is a fitting first stop — the Pennsylvania prologue to a story most travelers only ever pick up in Illinois or Kentucky. Pair it with the region's other colonial and early-American sites for a day that traces how deep the country's family trees really go.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Mordecai Lincoln
- · Abraham Lincoln
- · George Boone Jr.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Daniel Boone
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1947
Daniel Boone was born here in the Oley Valley on November 2, 1734, to a Quaker family, and spent his first sixteen years in the Pennsylvania backcountry before the family moved south. The hunting, tracking, and woodcraft he learned on this ground carried him into legend as the pathfinder of Kentucky's Wilderness Road. The homestead a few miles north is preserved as a historic site.
Daniel Boone Homestead
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1948
On the rolling farmland of Berks County stood the log dwelling where Daniel Boone was born in 1734 to a Quaker family of English and Welsh descent. Boone spent his first sixteen years here, learning to hunt and range the Pennsylvania woods before the family pushed south and west, skills that would carry him into legend on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The homestead endured long after the Boones departed and is preserved today by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Daniel Boone
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1957
Daniel Boone, born here in the Oley Valley in 1734, spent his first sixteen years on the family homestead before the Boones pushed south and west into the Carolina and Kentucky backcountry. Long before he became the legendary blazer of the Wilderness Road and a symbol of American frontier daring, he was a Pennsylvania farm boy hunting the woods of Berks County. The homestead a few miles north is preserved today as a state historic site.
Exeter Friends Meeting
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1979
Quakers established this Berks County meeting in 1725 as "Oley," renaming it Exeter in 1742, and raised the present stone meeting house in 1759 on the site of two earlier log structures. Among those buried in its ground are members of the Boone and Lincoln families—kin to the frontiersman Daniel Boone and to the ancestors of Abraham Lincoln. After closing in 1899, the meeting reopened for worship in 1949.