The 1998 Spittoon Debate in the Lincoln home.

[Susan Higginbotham]

I was thinking about Mrs. Lincoln owning forty footstools. At first that number sounds excessive; but was it then? You all tell me. If you placed a couple of them in the various rooms of a house the numbers would add up. Or am I off my rocker? Lol.

Was this just in the Springfield house or the White House? I would think homes during Victorian times had more footstools than today and would wear out needing replacing.

Robert Lincoln wrote in a letter to Leonard Swett dated May 25, 1884, that when his mother was on her way to the asylum at Batavia, she packed a "number of carpet bags," and that he peeked inside them when Mary's back was turned and saw that each contained a footstool. I don't know whether those were the same footstools Eva was referring to.