Peter Brooner came with his family to the same community two years before, and Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, who reared Mrs. Lincoln and her cousin, Dennis Hanks, came one year later than the Lincolns.
A peculiar disease, called "the milk sickness," prevailed in the community in 1818. Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Brooner, and others died of this disease near the same time. Thomas Lincoln, having learned the carpenter and cabinet-maker's trade in Kentucky, made all their coffins from green lumber sawed with a whip-saw. Their bodies were laid to rest on the little hill a few hundred yards south of the Lincoln home.
Peter Brooner had two sons, Henry and Allen. I became acquainted with these brothers twenty-two years ago. I was pastor of a church at Dale, three miles from Lincoln City, two years, near where Allen lived, and of a country church near where Henry lived. I was frequently at their homes. They both knew Abraham Lincoln quite well. The Thomas Lincoln and Peter Brooner homes were only one-half mile apart. Henry was five years older, and Allen was four years younger than Abraham. "Uncle Henry," as he was always called, gave me the following items, which I wrote at the time, and have preserved the original notes:
"I was born in Breckenridge County, Kentucky, February 7, 1804. We came to Indiana in 1814, when Allen was one year old. No man has lived longer in the State than I have, for I have lived in it ever since it became a State, and before. The Lincoln family came to Indiana two years later, and we lived one-half mile apart. During my mother's last sickness, Mrs. Lincoln often came to see her, and died just one week after my mother's death. I remember very distinctly that when Mrs. Lincoln's grave was filled, my father, Peter Brooner, extended his hand to Thomas Lincoln and said, 'We are brothers, now,' meaning that they were brothers in the same kind of sorrow. The bodies of my mother and Mrs. Lincoln were conveyed to their graves on sleds. I often stayed all night at Thomas Lincoln's. Dennis Hanks and his sister Sophia lived with Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, and at their deaths Dennis and his sister heired the estate. I helped drive up the stock on the day of the sale of the property. Dennis Hanks married Lincoln's step-sister. I often went with Lincoln on horseback to Huffman's Mill, on Anderson Creek, a distance of sixteen miles. He had a great memory, and for hours he would tell me what he had read."
