Kim Bauer opens a file folder to show a small, sealed plastic bag, containing a clump of Abraham Lincoln’s hair, cut away from his fatal head wound as he lay on a boarding house bed across the street from Ford’s Theatre.
The folder also holds a small swatch of brown-stained cloth, in its own bag of clear plastic – a fragment of a towel that was used that night of April 14, 1865 in an effort to stop the dying president’s bleeding.
There are other Lincoln treasures at Bauer’s fingertips: one of five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s own handwriting; a letter Lincoln signed (franked) to grant free postage when he was postmaster in New Salem; the marriage certificate of Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd; and the only existing photograph of the slain president in his casket.
But Bauer, the curator of the State of Illinois’ superb collection of Lincoln relics, can’t reach them easily. He has to put the folder with the hair and towel fragment away before taking out the one containing the casket photo. That’s because there’s hardly room to move around in this cramped, closet-like vault where the rarest and most significant materials are held.
Indeed, Illinois’s 46,000-item Lincoln collection – one of the greatest in the world and perhaps the best in its breadth of items spanning nearly the entire life of the nation’s 16th president — is stored, crammed, shoe-horned, really, into a rabbit-warren of odd spaces, including this 5-by-20-foot vault, in a sub-basement of the Old State Capitol building. And it has been hidden away like this for decades.
But not much longer.
Just up 6th Street, covering nearly two city blocks, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum — a $115-million institution that will bring the state’s Lincoln collection out of the sub-basement and into the light — is now under construction.
“I can hardly wait to go to the new facility,” Bauer says.
For a year and a half, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has been big news — as a political football.
In late 2000, U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), feuding with fellow Republican Gov. George Ryan, tried to block federal funding for the project. Arguing that Ryan’s scandal-scarred administration would use the project for fat-cat contracts and permit huge cost overruns, Fitzgerald filibustered on the floor of the Senate for several hours over a two-day period before permitting the vote that approved the money 83-13.
Then, last fall, Ryan raised the ire of historic preservationists by suggesting that he might appoint his chief of staff, Robert Newston, to head the new institution, even though Newston isn’t a professional historian or librarian. Newston eventually withdrew his name, but the controversy continues to simmer over who will run the library-museum and what arm of state government will oversee it.
And lost amid the thunderclaps of charges and countercharges has been the new facility itself — a major national institution that will honor the Great Emancipator, show off treasures long squirreled away, tell Lincoln’s life story with technological wizardry and provide an economic boost to Springfield.
For the people
“It’s a shame. [The collection’s documents and artifacts] have been locked up all these years and not been able to be shown,” says Ryan’s wife, Lura Lynn, the chairwoman of a foundation that is seeking $35 million in private funds to help pay construction costs and establish an endowment for the institution. “There are people all over the world who are going to be thrilled.”
The 100,000-square-foot library is set to open at the end of this year or the beginning of 2003. The 98,000-square-foot museum is expected to be completed in the spring or summer of 2004.
“It may sound silly, but my favorite [of the collection] is Mrs. Lincoln’s wedding dress. As a woman and a mother of five daughters, that’s something that’s interesting to me,” says Lura Lynn Ryan. “There’s also a gorgeous ring there, Mary’s. I love it.”
Actually, the state’s collection only has the skirt to Mary Todd Lincoln’s wedding dress, but it also has another of her dress skirts and a complete gown that she wore when her photo was taken in 1861 by Mathew Brady.
They’re stored in an area of the sub-basement called the stacks — a low-ceilinged, claustrophobia-inducing room of tall, closely packed shelving and artifact-crammed cubbyholes.
The shelves contain copies of 10,000 books about Lincoln, more than half of the estimated 16,000 that have been published. In the cubbyholes is a wealth of Lincolniana, such as an oil portrait of Lincoln, painted from life, by William Cogswell, one of four life portraits owned by the state, none of which is now on public display.
Few people, beyond scholars, know of the state’s Lincoln collection and its present location. “We don’t advertise it,” says Thomas Schwartz, the state historian. The problem is that there simply isn’t room in the sub-basement for many visitors.
Six miles of shelving
Nonetheless, there is a makeshift display space in the small open area outside the vault and the stacks, as well as along a nearby balcony. Here, scores of statues, busts and paintings of Lincoln are ranged in no particular order — the glorious, the mundane and the odd, crowded together in a hodge-podge.
All of these items — from the clump of Lincoln’s hair, to his wife’s dresses, to the 1,500 documents in the collection that were written or signed by Lincoln — tell their own parts of the story of the Civil War president and his importance to the nation, then and ever since.
That’s the story, Schwartz says, that the new institution will tell.
The first step in the relocation will be to move the collection to the new library building, a structure that will house the bulk of the Lincoln material as well as the much more extensive Illinois State Historical Library, featuring six miles of shelving, 66 percent more manuscript storage space and nearly triple the storage capacity for microfilm.
At the new library, the Lincoln documents will be available to researchers primarily on microfilm or in photocopy form. “There’s very little reason to actually have to use the originals, especially if there’s a published version,” Schwartz says.
But there will also be instances when some of the less fragile and less important documents, such as photographs or newspapers from Lincoln’s time, will be made available to researchers — even high school students.
“You’ve got to create historians. It’s a nurturing process,” Schwartz says. “One of the things that whets that appreciation [for history] is the use of these materials.”
The museum building, with its high-tech theaters — including one that will combine holographic imagery with a live actor’s performance — its you-are-there scenes from Lincoln’s life and its displays of items from the president’s life will be the institution’s chief tourist attraction, drawing an estimated 600,000-plus visitors a year.
The largest exhibit will be “The Journey,” a chronological tour through Lincoln’s life that will feature the usual display cases with information, artifacts and documents, as well as tableaux showing Lincoln on various important dates. Many of these tableaux, Schwartz says, will permit visitors to actually walk into the scene itself.
Latex history
It’s the state’s plan to fill these dioramas with life-size latex figures of Lincoln, as well as his family, friends, colleagues and opponents, that has provided the one spark of controversy about the library-museum.
Since mid-2000, John Y. Simon, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, has been waging a one-man crusade against the figures, which he dismisses as “vulgar” and characterizes as akin to the Pillsbury Doughboy. (There will be nearly two dozen of Lincoln himself, and another 20 or so of people in his life.)
However, most Illinois citizens apparently disagree with Simon.
In the summer of 2000, a prototype of the Lincoln figure was on display at the Old State Capitol building and at that year’s state fair, and more than 600 people who examined the figure submitted written comments.
According to an analysis of those comments by the Springfield State Journal-Register, 79 percent of the respondents endorsed the use of the latex figures for the museum. Only 11 percent opposed their use, while 10 percent took no stand.
The new museum will also feature gallery space for temporary exhibits, and it’s in these short-term shows where some of the most delicate of the Lincoln relics — Mary Todd Lincoln’s dress, or the clump of Lincoln’s hair, or the blood-stained fabric — may be on display at times. And there will be be a children’s area, called “Mrs. Lincoln’s Attic,” where children can play with oversize Lincoln Logs and a dollhouse representing the Lincoln home.
The heart of the museum will be the legacy and treasures room where some of the collection’s rarest items — the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s handwriting, for example, or his signature on a poster-size copy of the Emancipation Proclamation — will be housed.
Schwartz says it’s likely that key items of collection will be rotated through the room so that their exposure to light will be limited. “You can’t allow these things to be on display 24/7 for 365 days a year,” he says.
The goal, he says, will be to help visitors understand that all of the items, from the rarest to the most commonplace, have a place in helping each generation understand Lincoln.
“All these documents are stories,” he says. “All these documents are the stuff history is made of. It just requires people to take the time to find the stories in these documents.”
And he adds, “What we know about Lincoln is from teasing the stories out of all these disparate items.”
Odds (very) and ends of Lincolniana
Among the Lincolniana in the State of Illinois’ collection is a variety of items ranging from the macabre to the quirky. Here are some:
– Lincoln’s shaving mirror from his Springfield home, as well as Mary Todd Lincoln’s jewelry box and her sewing basket.
– A tin of Old Abe chewing tobacco from the 1880s. (Lincoln didn’t smoke or drink.)
– A videotape of the 1989 movie, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” in which the two clueless teens go back in time to get historical figures, including Lincoln, to help them with their history test.
– An axe used in the unsuccessful 1876 attempt to break into Lincoln’s tomb and kidnap his body for ransom.
– A small, framed, flower-patterned section of fabric from the dress actress Laura Keene was wearing on the night Lincoln was shot while he was watching her perform at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Keene cradled the president’s head in her lap that night, and the large brown stains on the fabric may be Lincoln’s blood — or perhaps the blood of Major Henry Rathbone who, in trying to grab the president’s assassin John Wilkes Booth, was severely slashed.
– A portrait of Lincoln painted in the 1920s, recently purchased on eBay for $325.
– A baseball-type cap from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
– An 18-inch-tall china figurine, originally designed to depict Great Britain’s Prince Albert but adapted in 1865 (mainly through the addition of an amateurishly painted black beard) to represent the slain American president.
– The Lincoln family’s music box, which plays 10 opera arias.
– A bronze life mask of Lincoln, cast in February, 1865.
– A videotape of the 1942 movie, “Holiday Inn,” in which Bing Crosby sings a song honoring Lincoln while wearing blackface — a scene that would be deemed racially insensitive today.
– A gaudily painted chalk bust, now chipped, of the president, picked up at a flea market.
— Patrick T. Reardon
