The Knob Creek Boy statue is a highly realistic faux bronze full size figure of a seven year old Abraham Lincoln with a custom sculpted head and period costume clothe body in a sitting pose upon a keg with a piece of sugar candy nestled in his hand.

LifeFormations art and technology studio located in Bowling Green, Ohio used an artistic technique of image modification of a photograph digitally with a computer to achieve an age regression model of the young Abraham capturing his appearance during the last year of life in the county.

The pose is taken from a recollection recorded in correspondence with Lincoln’s law partner, William Henry Herdon. After settling in Hannibal [MO], Abraham Lincoln then a candidate for the Presidential honors having gone to Kansas on business – and returning through Hannibal learned that Judge [John B.] Helm live there, called at his office with this traveling friends, and after making some inquiries in order to identification – as forty years had wrought visible changes in both – Lincoln then turned to his friends remarked: “Gentlemen, here is the first man I knew that wore store clothes all the week, and this is the same man who fed me on sugar as I sat upon a nail keg” – then minutely related the whole circumstance. Helm was a resident of Elizabethtown, Kentucky for considerable years and the store that Lincoln visited was one in which Helm worked in that town.

The commission, a joint venture between Leadership Elizabethtown, the City of Elizabethtown and the Hardin County Historical Society and the Kentucky Arts Council, was presented to the museum in February 2008 as a permanent addition to the Lincoln, Family and Friends Exhibit.