Possible Lincoln artifact discovered!

[L Verge]

I found some clues to follow in determining the provenance of both the chest of drawers "signed" by "Tad" and the parlor set supposedly purchased from Mary Lincoln by John Alston. I found the information in a January 2015 posting on the Henry Ford Museum webpage by Charles Sable, one of the curators at the Henry Ford. http://www.thehenryford.org/explore/blog...-lincolns/

First, there are photos of two pieces of the parlor set we have been discussing - a marble-topped center table and an upholstered side chair. They are listed as having been purchased by Mrs. Lincoln in 1866 for her Chicago home. No mention, however, of why she sold them the next year - and no mention of Alston or how they were purchased by Ford at least forty years later.

As for the Springfield furnishings, this site says that Lincoln sold almost all of the furnishings and equipment from that home when the family left for Washington. It was mainly purchased by a colleague and neighbor, Henry Wilton, an Illinois State Marshall. Ford acquired the pieces (some shown on the Ford Museum website) in 1930 from Wilton's grandsons.

If you really think that the chest of drawers once belonged to the Lincolns, I think its age/style would suggest that it could have gone home with Henry Wilton in 1860. Henry Ford did not usually buy a pig in a poke, so I would think there had to be some good provenance attached to what he acquired from the Wiltons - and was a chest of drawers ever mentioned in their collections file?