Was Lincoln actually a Tar Heel? (08-19-2025--Hour3)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. So yesterday I mentioned this story, but I did not have time to get to it in detail. So I am paying it off today. I'm gonna circle back Jen Psaki style, and we're gonna go give you the details on this that apparently, apparently Abe Lincoln was born in North Carolina, not Kentucky. This is a according to the Lincoln Center in Bostic, North Carolina, which is in Rutherford County, and so it must be true now all of okay, it's a museum, and Jamie boll Over at WBTV he went and paid a visit to the museum, did a story on it, and he says the museum is challenging the history books that the nation's sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln was not born in Kentucky, but he was born right here in the Tar Hill State. And you got to acknowledge here that most of the evidence here is folklore, okay, just stuff that people told each other at the time, and it just got passed down, stories that were shared through the generations. And it was first pieced together by a guy named Tom Melton, a longtime Rutherford County school educator. Okay, so a teacher. Here's the story from WBTV. The tale told here is one of hardship and frankly scandal. It's largely the story of Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks was her name Nancy Hanks. In the late seventeen hundreds, her single mom had no way to support her, so it is said that she was sent to live and work for a prominent Rutherford County landowner named Abraham en Lowe and his family. And according to the museum, the belief is that she did household chores, she cooked for the family, and then she became Abraham Enlow's assistant. I don't know what those job duties entail. She would travel with him on business mm hmmm, mm hmm, and sometime around eighteen oh four she got pregnant, and she was moved to another piece of en Low family near Cherokee. So she was sent out to western North Carolina, Cherokee County. The museum says that they believe that en Low Abraham en Low sent her west either after the child was born to provide for her in a more secretive location, or she chose to go out there. Then he brings her back and shows her around town, and the story goes, the reason he did so was because all the townsfolk were saying that he whacked her, that he had her killed and the kid too, and so he wanted to prove that he did not kill her, and so he brought her back for proof of life, showed her around town. Here she is, see, I didn't kill my assistant, who somehow or another got pregnant while traveling with me on business. Right shortly thereafter, Thomas Lincoln. Tom Lincoln, the man that traditional history tells us was Abraham's father, enters this version of history. En Low, Abraham and Low is said to have paid Tom Lincoln five hundred dollars to take responsibility for Nancy and the young boy. Now, I don't know if you remember this story or not. But if this sounds somewhat familiar, this is the John Edwards story. This is so on brand for North Carolina. Like this. I don't know if this is true or not, but when the legend becomes fact print the legend right. So, yeah, those who lived in Bostic say they saw Tom Lincoln load up in a wagon with the woman and the child. It said that they headed out of state and they were married in Kentucky. So look back in those days, right, this was scandalous, and so it kind of makes sense that you would go to a different state and you would have a whole different origin story and like, of course, this is my son and this is my wife. We come from North Carolina and whatever like this would be you start afresh. You can't do that nowadays, with the Internet and all of the apps and such, all the social media, you can't do this anymore. So the people who study folk history will tell you time and again if there is a consistency and there is no reason to have made it up. Those are two of the baselines for truth, according to one of the museum cure rators. So word of mouth is basically all we have. We have these stories that were told, passed down through the generations. There is no birth certificate here, which would I mean, that's that would make him very much like Barack Obamas. I'm kidding. I'm just kidding. It's just a joke. There is a There is a photo though, a curious photo. You remember Abraham Enlow, he had another son, and there is a photo of him. His name was Wesley. He is really tall and really lanky, and he kind of looks like Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, could be a half brother there, I don't know. Now. Here's the thing, though, it is a solvable mystery. DNA people DNA. The end Low descendants have provided DNA. The government has the remains of Abraham Lincoln, and there is a petition at the Bostic Lincoln Center at this little town museum that you can sign asking for the US Army to have it all tested, which seems like a pretty good way to solve the mystery. Should we I feel like we should. I feel like we should. I mean, no no offense to poke, right, but I like, I think he is the only North Carolina president that we've had, so like, I kind of feel like that would be a pretty good feather in the cap. Kentucky's gonna be mad. Look, they're gonna be angry about it, no doubt. It's going to be like the Right Brothers and First in Flight, that whole thing with uh with Ohio. Right, so we're gonna have a running battle with Ohio and we can have a running battle with Kentucky. We got the Mechlimberg Declaration of Independence as well, so we got the run in battle with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and like, yeah, we got like we can like we can't have like another one of these stories. I think we should do this. I think we should get the DNA tests, but I think there should be some privacy, Like I don't want this to be a spectacle when they like dig up Lincoln's remains or something. I don't even know. I guess he's in an I guess he's in a grave someplace. I don't know. I've never I've never been into a grave for Lincoln. If I did, I don't remember it. I'm been to Washington, DC since like nineteen eighty five. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app, and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscripe. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Let's jump over to the phones. We got a couple of callers here. This is Buddy. Hello, Buddy, welcome to the program. Hey love to show right Sarah, thank you. I want to way on the linking thing. Yeah, you know, I remember back when we had North Carolina history and US history in school, back in seventies or early eighties. This was always a point of contention. But the story was that she was traveling from one state to another when she had him. Mmm. No, no, they don't know. Which side of the state line that going on. That is Andrew Jackson? Are you that was Andrew Jackson? They still don't know the exact birthplace. The two most likely locations Crawford plant because people on the text line were saying, hey, what about Andrew Jackson. He was North Carolina born, but we don't know that. One is Crawford Plantation, located in Lancaster County, South Carolina. And then the other is the George McCamey Cabin, which is in now Union County, North Carolina. Both sites are located only a few miles from each other, and that and at the time of his birth, the state line had not been drawn and so the but his mother had come back to the area to bury her husband and she gave birth during that trip. Oh okay, so we don't know where he was born. Yeah, so we can we can play. Lincoln was always which state he was born too. Yeah. Well, now, yeah, so you got Rutherford County, the town of Boston, and Kentucky. So like we're just gonna take it. We're gonna we're gonna take all of them. I agree with you. We should just exam the body test, right, it's. Super easy, I think, yeah, right, let's do it. And then like we can imagine we could be like we could have the most presidents from North Carolina, Like we could be the state that has the most presidents. That's right, Yeah, all right with them. Yeah, man, appreciated, buddy. And and then we put that on our license plates too, birthplace of Lincoln. We do that as a thumb in the eye because then you got Kentucky, mad at Us and Ohio and those two states they're like right next to each other up there, Like we gonna have a whole rivalry thing going. I mean, they would accuse us of stealing all of their historical figures and stuff. But look, it's first in flight, man, and they I'm sorry, but they flew here first, you know, kitty hawk, Like, I'm sorry they built bikes up there, but they flew here. Okay, this is seth. Welcome to the program. Seth Hey, Pete Hey, got a quick tid bit of information. I think a lot of people don't even know about dad to the Lincoln lore. But if you go to Belmont, there's a neighborhood called Pinstow Forest Andy Acres. My grandparents lived there when I was a child. You can walk through the woods and there's a monument, a stone monument too Nancy Lincoln's mom and it was her mother's mother's house. Interesting in Belmont. In Belmont, it's near the river South Fork Cataba. Yeah, so long since I've been there. I was a child when I walked down there with my grandfather. But it's just it almost looks like a gravestone. It's a stone monument, and it's a monument to Lincoln's mother's mother's house. Her name here, what is her name, Nancy Hanks or it's her mom? Yeah, I think it was Nancy. Yeah, so Lincoln's Mom's name was Nancy Hanks. And you're saying this monument is Nancy is to Nancy Hanks's mother, correct, gotcha? Well, that would make sense because the mother sent Nancy to Rutherford County to go work for Abraham en Low and apparently give birth to his child, which, yeah, so and that would make sense. Interesting, Well, I live very close to Belmont. I'm gonna have to go on a little bit of a monument hunt down there. Yeah, most of that is now developed, but it's Yeah, it was a loult through the woods across the street from their house, and yeah, I remember seeing it as a child, being fascinated by it. Wild. All right, hey, Seth, thanks man, I appreciate that. Yes, sir, thank you, all right, take care. John up in New Jersey says on the text line, the last direct descendant of Lincoln died in nineteen eighty five, so DNA could be found there too. Well that's helpful. They don't have to go through all the government red tape in order to get the DNA. Because so during the break, I actually looked up Lincoln's tomb and I went on a virtual tour. So I'm now an expert on Lincoln and the burial and so it's obviously this is in it's actually Springfield, Illinois, oak Ridge Cemetery, I believe, and they've got this big tomb building and inside the building there's like a receiving area and you can go on a virtual tour and walk through the hallway and stuff, and then you get to this thing and it's a big stone. It looks like a headstone, but I think that's actually where the body is. I think it's in there. It won't let me cross. There's little velvet rope line there, so the virtual tour won't let me get any closer, obviously, But but yeah, so I like that that's one way to go get the DNA out of that, or get the DNA from the last descendant of Lincoln. If they did it, are they on ancestry dot com? What about the one that just got sold and all the DNA stuff got sold with it, right, what about that? Maybe they did one of those. I'm just saying, like, we should find this out. I would, I would. I would support the North Carolina legislature appropriating a small amount of money taxpayer funds to go get this done, to get a DNA test, probably run about like one hundred bucks. Like we could do that. I think we could do that, and then we start making the license plates and then you know, war with Kentucky and Ohio. Probably here's a great idea, how about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Asheville and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditions, smart TVs, Wi Fi, grills, outdoor tables, and your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call her text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight, or check out all there is to offer at cabins Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. This is from Kirk in Belmont. He says, I live within walking distance from Pinstow, so I will check out that marker. And another This is from Floyd, who says, as a retired Belmont PD officer, your caller is correct about Nancy Hanks and the marker in Belmont. There you go, confirmation, that's all I need. We claim Lincoln to Julia says, this is all so incredibly interesting. Can you repeat the alleged step brother of Lincoln? His name Wesley something. I believe it was, hang on, hang on, I believe it's Wesley en Low mm hmmmm mm hmm. Yeah, just says his name is Wesley. Yeah, so Wesley en low E n l o E. His father was Abraham M. Low And now look that's kind of weird too, don't you think, like, why why would Nancy Hanks name her kid after her boss? Right? Doesn't that seem a bit weird? Uhh? I mean, I uh, I just think it's more obvious that you name them after your father or after the father of the child, especially if you're trying to make a claim, trying to stay connected. You know, hey, Pete, they have the d R tools and I think a piece of Lincoln, of the doctor's tools and a piece of lincoln skull at the Smithsonian. There's your DNA. Nice And they got the bloody pillow. I completely forgot about this. I saw the pillow across the street from Ford's Theater right in d C. And you go on the school field trip and they take you to the site where the president died, because that's what every fifth grader needs to have in their head. And I remember seeing the pillow and thinking, that's not a lot of blood. That's what I thought. I thought there'd be way more blood, you know, but I don't know whatever, so like, but I remember it looked brand because it was so old. It's just you know, staying on the pillow and just but uh, yep, So take it off the pillow because I doubt anybody slept on it after Lincoln, but maybe, oh there could be DNA on it before, Like do we know. I don't think we know what the hygiene practices were of that hotel or whatever it was where they brought him. This is from Steve. I have two books that reference similar folklore. One is the History of Gaston County and the other is History of Mccaddenville. One references Nancy Hanks being involved with a will to do figure from the mccaddonville Belmont area. I have seen the monument that the other caller referenced down the road or sorry, down on the river in mccaddenville. I will locate the books to get more information. Mark says Pete. If he was born in North Carolina, then Ohio and Illinois. Oh, some child support, that's. Right. So is Abraham Lincoln's real last name en Low? I don't know. I think back in those days, I think you just could call yourself whatever you wanted to call yourself, because there weren't any birth certificates issued, right, and so if they you know, if this guy en Low paid Tom Lincoln five hundred bucks to take care of this woman and his illegitimate child and move to Kentucky and then they just presented themselves as married and this is my son, and that's all that you would know. So that would be sort of like the adoption before there were paperwork. Seth says President en Low just sounds weird. Yeah, it does not have the they're gonna have to rename They're gonna have to rename that city in Nebraska unless you're just naming it after the father that you know, paid some guy to take Abraham Lincoln away from him. Hmhm, that's a very unseemly, all of us unseemly. Uh, Gregory says. Uh. The older curator for that Rutherford County Museum told me the Lincoln birth story. He said to his mother, did you know that Abraham Lincoln was born near here? And she said yeah. And so he asked, well, why was the house not preserved? And she said, why would anybody want to preserve Lincoln's birthplace? That's it? Yes, And I think producer Nick was saying that the tomb apparently had to be like fortified and whatnot because some people may have tried to steal the body, which I suspect there may be some salty Southerners that probably would have, you know, maybe hatched that kind of a plan. So I think it's been enough time, right, I think enough time has passed. Probably should have preserved the bedroom or the house rather. I see I did get another message that was regarding to do all of my critique of our sheriff. Please be careful. I enjoy your show. I don't want to hear of your demise. Thankslly. Now that's why I have the producers start my vehicle on the way home every day. Every day. Can't be too safe. So NASA is looking to nuke the Moon. Did you hear this? I don't know why this isn't a bigger story. Well, I mean, they're gonna build a nuclear plant on the Moon. That's got to be very difficult working conditions. Do not drop a tool, my goodness. Although I guess you could just like let it. If you just like let go, it'll just kind of hang there maybe right when it just kind of suspend in mid air or not mid space. It would just be like hovering around you. So that actually could be very helpful. You could just like line up all your tools. No, you would have I'd say, magnetic board. Get yourself a magnetic board, and then you could just like throw the tools onto the magnetic board and it would stay there. Yeah. So they want to build a one hundred kilowatt nuclear reactor on the Moon by twenty thirty, so in six years, which I think right, that's like a tenth of the time it takes to build a reactor on Earth. That's way faster, which makes sense. Look, I'm all for it. First off, I'm all for nuclear. Build more nuclear power plants. If we got to build one on the Moon first before we can build one in America, so be it. But we need to build more nuclear number one. Number two, I feel like it's important to beat the tricoms to the moon because at some point they're going to land on the Moon. At some point, did they land on the moon yet? I feel like they sent something up there. But they're going to get in a person on the moon, and then they're going to claim the whole moon. You know that's happening. They're going to claim the whole moon. All right. 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Right, you got to check out incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive tripkit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns A message here asking with will all of the construction workers be Aliens on the moon? Well, yes, but we don't call them aliens. We would call ourselves migrants, undocumented migrants. We would be on the moon. Okay, Sean says. The fake moon landing films teach us that the moon has gravity, That the Moon does have a little bit of gravity, but usually it's not so serious. Sorry, that's a terrible gravity joke. But all right. So the NASA folks are going to be speeding up the timeline for getting a nuclear reactor on the Moon and bolster it's public private partnerships with space companies. We are in a race to the Moon, in a race with China to the Moon, and to have a base on the Moon. To do that, we need energy, said Sean Duffy, Transportation Secretary. This fission technology is critically important, and so we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying can we do it? We are now going to move beyond just the studying. NASA officials are hopeful this new timeline will mark a big step in eventual human habitation on the Moon. I'm thinking, like we already own the moon. That's my belief. Like we landed there, we claimed it. It's ours. No one else has rights to it. Nobody else has been on the moon. We've been on the moon. That's ours. That's those are we got dips. Okay, So now we're gonna go and we're gonna set up some base camp operations up there. And that's why you need the reactor. One senior NASA officials said, it's the difference between getting a new set of keys at the apartment building versus going into the wilderness with an AX. Right, so you're gonna do stuff up there, you need power, and the Moon apparently doesn't get sun all the time, so solar panels aren't gonna cut it. A small fission reactor would substitute for solar power because there are like two week long lunar nights and so it can be difficult to transport the solar panels. Also, because the batteries are super heavy, nuclear power will help NASA navigate the Moon's harsh environment by powering technology on cold, dark nights. NASA officials are quick to point out that the US naval submarines and aircraft carriers rely on nuclear power for propulsion technology and electricity already. This is the difference. This is the difference between Artemis and Apollo. Okay, right now, they've been focusing their attention on getting there, and they've already done that. That's for the Apollo program. Now the Artemis program is to focus on staying there. And I'm thinking, like, there's a lot of rock up there, The Moon rocks, and so I'm thinking there may be a bunch of stuff up there that would be quite valuable for advanced technology for processing and such. Right, we hear all this stuff about rare earth minerals. Might they be on the moon. I don't know how rare earth minerals would arrive on the Moon, but maybe they got there somehow, and so maybe there's a bunch of rare earth minerals that are on the Moon. They would be called minerals. As I understand, these rare minerals may even be more powerful. There could be some rocks up there that we don't even have here that could be way better than the stuff we have here, and we could corner the market on it. But mainly we keep the try coms off the rock. That's what I'm in it for. Get up there, set up a nuclear plant, and then just start putting up like electrified fencing everywhere. So now you can't land on the moon. You can't even come here like this is our moon. I'm all for it, all right. Let me jump and get Mark on real quick. Hello, Mark, I've got about a two minutes for you. Yes, sir, interesting story out of Gaston County. I married a young girl fifty years ago in Gastonia whose name was Sandra Inload and they have a booklet where they have traced back. Their story of their lineage goes back to Abraham in Load and his wife lived in Belmont. The police officer was correct in Belmont. There's a marker there now, but there used to be actually an old little house. The man wouldn't rich. He was I think the farmer down near the Cataba River. But in any event, the story goes from their family that he took in this girl who was kind of wayward and didn't have a book. Noh, we lost Mark say that they didn't want him to tell the truth. I don't know what happened. We lost his connection. I hope you're okay, Mark. This is what happens, right when you start trying to get the truth out there. People want to silence him. No, I'm just I think he just got disconnected. I don't know, ran through a band, a bad cell. Yeah. So I'm convinced. I am now convinced Lincoln was born here. We're claiming him. Now, we've got another president from North Carolina. We got Poke. I'm claiming Jackson. I saw somebody write in about Andrew Johnson too. I'll take him, don't. I've done no research on Johnson. At all, except I think he wasn't a really great president. But I don't care. I'm gonna take all of them. We're gonna take as many US presidents as we can. We're like getting we're gonna get like we're gonna get like five of a kind here just in time for America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.