Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation Owes Big $$$

[L Verge]

Found this on an NPR site from 2013:

By the way: The hat fits. It's 7 1/8 inches — Lincoln's head size — and in those days, top hats were custom-made. It also bears the mark of his Springfield hat maker.

Over the years, every scrap of paper on which Abe Lincoln scribbled is preserved and analyzed. But when William Waller got that hat, be it in Illinois or Washington, Abe Lincoln was on the edge of failure — losing a senatorial campaign or a civil war — not the kind of fame that got his face carved into mountainsides.

But farmer Waller kept that hat his whole life and passed it on to his son, who was a five-term state legislator who died in 1956. His second wife sold it to a collector and attached that affidavit.

James Cornelius, the Lincoln library's curator, told us that calls to test the hat for DNA are even worse than a bad idea." DNA tests on a 160-year-old hat would not be conclusive and could harm what is, after all, not a bloody shirt in a murder trial, but something that's been deemed a historical artifact. And the suggestion that the hat be vacuumed for traces of Abe Lincoln's dandruff just made him laugh. In the end, Lincoln's legend is larger than a size 7 1/8 hat.