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Sword stolen from Lincoln's Tomb statue
The (Springfield) State Journal-Register ^ | 11/11/2011 | JASON NEVEL

Posted on 11/12/2011 4:06:39 PM PST by markomalley

Not even Lincoln’s Tomb is immune to the spree of copper thefts that have hit the Springfield area.

A copper sword brandished by a statue of a Civil War artillery officer atop the tomb was stolen sometime between September and early November.

The theft is believed to have been a first to state property at the Lincoln Tomb State Historic Site since 1890, said Dave Blanchette, a spokesman for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

A tomb employee noticed the sword was missing last week.

The sword was part of a statue grouping mounted on the terrace of the tomb. There are four such groupings on the balcony, one each representing the artillery, cavalry, infantry and navy during the Civil War.

“We just cannot imagine why someone would even think about doing it, let alone climb up the steps and actually do it,” Blanchette said.

Site officials plan to repair the statue, he said.

The theft probably occurred after Oak Ridge Cemetery was closed to visitors, Blanchette said, noting that a chain blocks daytime visitors from climbing the stone stairs to the balcony level.

“Anyone who would have gone up would have been noticed by a worker,” he said.

The thief broke off the roughly 3-foot-long sword at the handle. No significant damage was done to the rest of the statue.

Thefts of state property at the site are extremely rare, Blanchette said.

The last incident is thought to have occurred 101 years ago, he said, when the same sword was stolen from the artillery group. That sword would have been bronze, the metal the statues originally were all cast from (much of the raw material for the statues came from melted-down Civil War cannons). 

The bronze sword is believed to have been replaced by the copper version recently taken, he said.

Outside of those thefts, the tomb suffers an incident of vandalism about once every decade, Blanchette said. The most glaring example was in 1987, when racist graffiti was spray-painted on the tomb. Five teenagers were arrested for the crime.

A security guard was stationed at the tomb overnight in response to that incident, Blanchette said. However, within a couple of years, budget problems forced lawmakers to eliminate the position, he said.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; US: Illinois
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1 posted on 11/12/2011 4:06:40 PM PST by markomalley
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To: markomalley

Sad.


2 posted on 11/12/2011 4:11:58 PM PST by cripplecreek (A vote for Amnesty is a vote for a permanent Democrat majority. ..Choose well.)
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To: markomalley

O’Reilly!!!


3 posted on 11/12/2011 4:13:11 PM PST by G Larry (Catholic Conservative Supporting Israel!)
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To: markomalley

Some time in the not-so-distant future, entire cemeteries will be dug up and looted for metal.

Bronze military service plaques will be first to go.

It happens at every interregnum.


4 posted on 11/12/2011 4:19:09 PM PST by UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide (REPEAL WASHINGTON! -- Islam Delenda Est! -- I Want Constantinople Back. -- Rumble thee forth.)
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To: markomalley

Oh great, now Lincoln’s mummy will stalk the land looking for those who desecrated his tomb. And if he’s afoot, Grant, Sheridan and Sherman will be on the march with their armies of river demons.

Or at least it would be one heck of a CGI movie.


5 posted on 11/12/2011 4:20:04 PM PST by yefragetuwrabrumuy
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To: UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide

Wait until they go after diamond wedding rings. Our country is sick. Isn’t is sad?


6 posted on 11/12/2011 4:23:59 PM PST by Indy Pendance
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy

Don’t screw with zombie Lincoln.


7 posted on 11/12/2011 4:24:05 PM PST by cripplecreek (A vote for Amnesty is a vote for a permanent Democrat majority. ..Choose well.)
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy

Lincoln: Vampire Slayer will be in theaters in June, 2012.


8 posted on 11/12/2011 4:24:24 PM PST by madameguinot (Our Father's God to Thee, Author of Liberty)
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To: markomalley

9 posted on 11/12/2011 4:27:00 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
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To: markomalley

Fate must’ve been sleeping that night. Because that would’ve been a beautiful time for a thief to slip and fall on the thing he was stealing.


10 posted on 11/12/2011 4:29:52 PM PST by LibWhacker
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To: markomalley
Did anyone search Obama for them?!
11 posted on 11/12/2011 4:32:38 PM PST by Ron H.
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To: UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide

“It happens at every interregnum.”

Most people will think you exaggerate.


12 posted on 11/12/2011 4:34:43 PM PST by Psalm 144 (Voodoo Republicans: Don't read their lips - watch their hands.)
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Look! It's Spam!!!


Click The Spam And Donate

Donate Anyway

13 posted on 11/12/2011 4:34:50 PM PST by DJ MacWoW (America! The wolves are here! What will you do?)
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To: Indy Pendance

What diamond wedding rings??? Do you know a poor undertaker. LOL


14 posted on 11/12/2011 4:55:01 PM PST by org.whodat (Just another heartless American, hated by "AMNESTY" Perry and his fellow demorats.)
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To: markomalley

Before Secret Service agents guarded the president, they chased counterfeiters. Their assignment did not formally shift until 1894, when a handful of agents served as Grover Cleveland’s bodyguards. But there is an earlier example of the Secret Service getting involved in presidential security, albeit briefly, and in a posthumous kind of way.

In 1876, Abraham Lincoln’s body lay within an aboveground white marble sarcophagus in a handsome tomb on the grounds of Springfield, Ill.’s Oak Ridge Cemetery. Oak Ridge was a rural cemetery located about 2 miles outside of the town. No groundskeeper lived there. No night watchman patrolled the area around the president’s tomb. And the only thing standing between Lincoln’s body and any would-be grave robbers was a single padlock on the tomb’s chamber door. Not even the president’s sarcophagus was burglarproof: Its lid was sealed, not with cement but with the less permanent plaster of Paris. To the distinguished gentlemen of Springfield who were members of the National Lincoln Monument Association, the organization charged with maintaining Lincoln’s tomb, the absence of rigorous security measures seemed perfectly reasonable. After all, who would want to steal Lincoln’s body?

Comic caper. The answer to that question was a gang of Chicago Irish counterfeiters led by a small-time crime boss named Big Jim Kennally. Early in 1876, Kennally’s best engraver of counterfeit plates, Benjamin Boyd, had been sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary in Joliet, Ill. To pressure the governor to release his man, Kennally recruited two members of his gang, Terence Mullen, a saloonkeeper, and Jack Hughes, a sometime manufacturer of counterfeit nickels, to kidnap Lincoln’s body. For ransom, they would demand $200,000 in cash and a full pardon for Boyd.

Given the cemetery’s minimalist approach to security, the gang actually had a better-than-even chance of pulling off the heist. But they made a significant mistake. Neither Mullen nor Hughes had any body-snatching experience, so they invited a man named Lewis Swegles, who they thought was a grave robber, to help them. They couldn’t have made a worse choice, because Swegles was a paid informant—a “roper”—of the Secret Service.

Swegles played his part as double agent well, reporting every detail of the plot to his boss, Patrick D. Tyrrell, chief of the Chicago district office of the Secret Service. On the night Swegles accompanied Mullen and Hughes to Oak Ridge Cemetery, Tyrrell and his agents were lying in wait for them at Lincoln’s tomb, witnesses for the comedy of errors that soon began. Although Mullen and Hughes were career criminals, they couldn’t pick a lock, so they had to cut through the padlock with a file. Once inside the tomb chamber, they found they could not lift Lincoln’s 500-pound cedar-and-lead coffin. The inept grave robbers were considering their options when a detective’s pistol accidentally went off outside. Mullen and Hughes bolted, but it wasn’t much of a getaway—they headed straight back to their saloon in Chicago where Tyrrell arrested them a couple days later.

Meanwhile, back in Springfield, the custodian of the tomb, John Carroll Power, was in a state of panic. If hapless amateurs could come so close to carrying off Lincoln’s body, what would happen if professional body snatchers targeted the tomb? The only solution Power could think of was to hide the body where no one could find it. So after dark, Power and five friends buried Lincoln in a shallow, unmarked grave in the tomb’s basement.

Code of honor. None of the men who buried the coffin that night had known Lincoln. They were ordinary guys—one was a railroad ticket agent, another was a hotelkeeper, and a third worked as a bank clerk. Yet it had fallen to them to safeguard the remains of Lincoln, and they took that obligation seriously, swearing never to reveal the location of the martyred president’s body. And in the years that followed, they kept that secret faithfully.

They were finally relieved of their obligation in 1901, when, under instructions from Robert Lincoln, the president’s only surviving child, Lincoln’s body was placed inside a steel cage, lowered into a 10-foot-deep vault, and buried under tons of wet concrete. He’s still there, in his tomb on the grounds of Oak Ridge Cemetery.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2007/06/24/a-plot-to-steal-lincolns-body


15 posted on 11/12/2011 5:01:47 PM PST by Graybeard58 (Of course Obama loves his country but Herman Cain loves mine.)
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To: org.whodat

I got a cigarette lighter from a funeral home, “Thanks for Smoking” imprinted on the lighter. I was seriously considering undertaking as a profession. I went into industrial engineering. Our choices, well, what can you say?


16 posted on 11/12/2011 5:18:06 PM PST by Indy Pendance
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To: markomalley

“A copper sword brandished by a statue of a Civil War artillery officer atop the tomb was stolen sometime between September and early November.”

Uh??? How’d they know that time frame?


17 posted on 11/12/2011 5:31:51 PM PST by rockinqsranch (Dems, Libs, Socialists, call 'em what you will, they ALL have fairies livin' in their trees.)
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To: G Larry

No, Paterno...he’s everyone’s latest villain


18 posted on 11/12/2011 5:37:00 PM PST by DLfromthedesert ( Honkies for Herman 2012)
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To: markomalley
"The last incident is thought to have occurred 101 years ago, he said, when the same sword was stolen from the artillery group."

A-ha! Probably the same thief this time!

19 posted on 11/12/2011 6:49:17 PM PST by UnwashedPeasant (Don't nuke me, bro)
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To: markomalley

Some crackhead wanted that $3 per pound of copper. Earlier this year right on Main St. in Rochester, NY somebody cut the brass rails off the Monroe County Building. I had some thieves steal about 300 pounds of aluminum siding this summer. They came back daily until my bud the contractor knocked one of them out.


20 posted on 11/12/2011 6:49:54 PM PST by printhead (Standard & Poor - Poor is the new standard.)
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