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Militaria and Political Auction
Lot 1278:
Lincoln Blood Stained Towel from his Death Chamber. CAG Encapsulated.Towel, .75" x .375", taken from the room where Abraham Lincoln died in the Peterson boarding house, and stained with President Lincoln’s blood. Encapsulated by CAG, measuring 2.375” x 3.375”.This swatch is a fragment of the towel which was used to cover the wound which led to the President’s death. It was later taken from the Peterson Boarding House. The lot was the property of the late Dr. Robert Gerald McMurtry of Fort Wayne, Indiana. A lifelong Lincoln scholar, he published works on President Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. As a guest of the State Department, he traveled extensively at home and abroad while lecturing on Lincoln and the preservation of the Union. He was a member of the Civil War Roundtable, authored numerous works and co-authored "The Insanity Files" chronicling Mary Todd Lincoln’s descent into dementia. During the course of his life, Dr. McMurtry built two exceptional collections of Lincolniana. The first can be seen at the Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, and the second at the Lincoln Life Insurance Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This item is accompanied by an additional provenance packet. Unlike the previous Lincoln blood-stained relics of the bed sheet that were previously offered, this towel actually was used to bandage the lethal wound. The swatches are also considerably larger than the previous swatches offered. One can imagine that less than 1/4 or 1/5 of the quantity of towels exist compared to the sheet, based on the size of a towel versus a bed sheet. While the sheet is very scarce, the towel is that much more rare and is more directly connected to Lincoln’s wound.On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
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