The Lincoln Chair- I was there!

[L Verge]

(05-16-2015 10:27 PM)historybuff22 Wrote:  From what I understand, Ford's theater and contents were shut down the day after the assassination and it remained closed for decades until the government turned it into a building for government offices. Among other items kept by the government was "the chair." Not sure of the exact date, but sometime in the late teens (?) a grand-daughter (?) of John Ford petitioned the government for the return of the chair. After fighting it in court for a few years, the chair was returned to a Ford. As it happened, Henry Ford had started his quest of historic buildings and relics for his Greenfield Village. The grand-daughter offered the chair to Henry Ford for $1,500 and he bought it.

On another matter, what I like to call it as being "The Postmortem Career of John Wilkes Booth," Finis Bates had purchased "booth the mummy" form the undertaker in Enid, Oklahoma in the early 1900s. When Finis Bates died, his wife sent a letter to Henry Ford offering to sell the mummy to him for $1,500. Ford declined.

Rick Brown
HistoryBuff.com
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There is an interesting story of how Henry Ford hired Frederick Black, a well-respected newspaper man with a Dearborn paper, to research the story of the Booth mummy before signing on the dotted line. Black was so thorough that he spent about 3-4 years investigating the whole thing before advising Ford not to buy it. Black's extensive papers are in a library in Michigan, I believe.