This coming Thursday will be February 12, 2009 – exactly 200 years since the birth of Abraham Lincoln. It’s my guess that most people do not connect Abraham Lincoln with Berks County, Pennsylvania. However, he had ancestors who lived there. Their homestead still exists on Lincoln Road in Exeter Township. It could very well be that his most intriguing link to Berks County is one of the least known. Jason Bruderick has written an excellent article about that link. Following is a teasr:
Buried in Charles Evans Cemetery is a woman who once
captured a future president’s attention – and maybe even his heart.
Matilda Edwards Strong is buried next to her husband, Newton D. Strong, under an elaborate marble headstone and footstone.
Matilda was important to Lincoln, and her family claimed he had proposed to her, said local historian Michelle Lynch, a board member at both the cemetery and Historical Society of Berks County.
Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, also mentioned the proposal in an early biography of the president, but Lynch said there’s nothing to substantiate it.
“That he admired her beauty and that the two flirted seems likely,” she said. “That this flirting was the cause of the break in his engagement with Mary Todd is possible. That Lincoln actually proposed to Matilda, well, who knows?”
Read the full article in the February 8, 2009 edition of the Reading Eagle.