Posted on 04/09/2005 9:52:10 PM PDT by Nascardude
LOUISIANA, Mo. - Twenty years ago, George St. Pierre handed over $10 for a framed scrap of cloth at a secondhand store. Now he hopes the swatch — supposedly from the coat President Lincoln was wearing when he was assassinated — is worth a small fortune.
AP Photo
On April 17, St. Pierre plans to put the postage stamp-sized swatch up for sale on GoAntiques.com. The minimum bid: $1 million.
But some Lincoln collectors are skeptical, saying St. Pierre has no documentation of ownership of the item from the time it supposedly was snipped from Lincoln's coat by souvenir scavengers until St. Pierre purchased it in 1987.
"How do we know what's genuine, a fairy tale, a wish or fraudulent?" said memorabilia broker Daniel Weinberg in Chicago. "It needs more than someone saying it appears the cloth may be similar to what Lincoln wore."
St. Pierre has authentication of sorts — most of it written correspondence from people who have examined the cloth since he bought it in Quincy, Ill., where Lincoln once debated Stephen Douglas.
Frank Hebblethwaite is a former technician at the museum at Ford's Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, and where the Lincoln coat is prominently displayed.
Hebblethwaite has told St. Pierre in writing that "it is quite possible that you do have a piece of the overcoat worn by President Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination."
However, museum officials have kept the coat behind glass to keep it protected, refusing to let experts pluck fibers from the garment for microscopic comparison to St. Pierre's swatch.
In the mid-1990s, the Ford Theater museum's then-curator, Marshal Kesler, had the St. Pierre swatch inspected and compared to the coat. Kesler told The Associated Press "it did appear that in all likelihood the piece is part of the coat. I'm 90 to 95 percent sure."
But Randy Bresee, a University of Tennessee professor specializing in textiles, said he can't positively link the swatch of cloth to the Lincoln era, much less to the coat. "You would have to compare it to the coat to be definitive," he said.
I wonder how much Lincoln's underwear would cost
Who would pay $1 million for a piece of 140 year old cloth, irrespective of the former owner?
That's old...better laminate it.
That's disgusting.
Thanks
Your welcome.
Aren't there still some bed sheets used by the Fab Four (The Beatles) that are cut up into a millions sqaures sitting in a warehouse some where?
...The honorable thing would be to give this to the museum, but, making a buck is utmost in importance...
Let's not underestimate the publicity value of this "auction" whether or not the item is bogus....
And the site is affiliated with that much more famous site started by the French gentleman....that went public... and that now is heavily supportive of Liberal stuff, if anybody cares to look.
I have a timex ironman watch that lincoln was wearing when he delivered the gettysburg address. Bidding will start and $500,000.
If a museum has the coat, and this guy claims it was cut from that coat, how difficult is it look for a swatch-shaped piece missing from the coat?
I was in DC recently and toured the Ford's Theatre museum and saw the over-coat that President Lincoln was wearing. As I remember, there was a section cut out of the coat and the museum curator said that someone did that on the night he was shot or something to that effect. But there was a piece cut out. President Lincoln's blood was still visible on the coat. As was Henry Rathbone's blood. All very visible. It was quite spine tingling standing there within a foot or two of the coat, and suit President Lincoln was wearing, as well as the gun Booth used. A must see for everyone.
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