Where'd that shutter come from?

[RJNorton]

(04-14-2014 09:18 PM)J. Beckert Wrote:  In speaking to Rick Smith today, we both recalled hearing Lincoln was carried from Ford's on a shutter. There aren't many references to this, but it's the only mention that makes sense. A board could have easily sufficed for a thin man like Lincoln, but the shutter is mentioned in at least one account. Where did it come from? Has anyone heard?

Joe, this is from p. 126 of W. Emerson Reck's A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours:

How the President was carried out on his short last journey appeared differently to many of the witnesses. Leale and Taft in their reports merely said he was carried out. Many other said he was carried out by "several men." James Mills said he was carried out on the shoulders of two men, an obvious impossibility. Thomas H. Sherman and Charles L. Willis saw four men carrying the President. Mrs. Virginia Lucas agreed with Jacob Soles that six men carried the President. William Ferguson and Mrs. Nelson Armstrong - on April 14 Kitty Brink, helping to make up members of the cast in dressing rooms until the clamor drew her to the stage - claimed that the President was carried out in the rocking chair in which he had been sitting. Flood, who was the first person to reach the box from the stage, said four soldiers and the doctors carried Lincoln out on a stretcher. Two members of the cast, E.A. Emerson and Mrs. J. H. Evans, declared he was carried out on a shutter. Several other persons claimed he was carried out on a stretcher, in most cases indicating that it was improvised from a shutter. Considering the fact that the partition normally dividing Boxes 7 and 8 was seven feet high and three inches thick, this interesting question has been raised: Could the "stretcher" on which Lincoln was carried to the Petersen House have been a section of the partition?"