Who is this lady?

[Steve Whitlock]

(06-28-2021 09:48 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Steve, FYI:

Willie Clark, the Petersen House boarder who was renting the room in which Lincoln died, wrote his sister a few days after the assassination. He wrote, "The same matrass is on my bed, and the same coverlit covers me nightly that covered him while dying." However, I do not see that he mentioned the sheet itself.

In Robert Bain's book it is mentioned that the Petersens decided to "give Mr. Clark some new bedding." However, there is nothing specific about exactly what happened with the sheet that was on Clark's bed. Bain is just going by family lore as he is a descendant of the Petersens. I do not place much trust in his book.

I do not think I can help with provenance...wish I could!

Roger,

An article in the Smithsonian magazine for the assassination and relics has the attached photo of Lincoln's deathbed the day after Lincoln died. The sheets are supposed to still be there, but aren't visible to look for a missing piece.

Lincoln’s Deathbed

At 7:22 and 10 seconds a.m. on April 15, after an all-night vigil, Abraham Lincoln died in a back room at the Petersen House on a bed that was too small for his frame. The doctors had had to lay him diagonally atop the mattress. Soldiers wrapped his naked body in an American flag and put him into a plain pine box—a rectangular military crate. Lincoln, the former rail-splitter, would not have minded so simple a coffin. After they took him home to the White House, sheets, pillows, towels and a coverlet lay on the boardinghouse bed, still wet with the president’s blood. Two Petersen House boarders, brothers Henry and Julius Ulke, one a photographer and the other an artist, set up a tripod camera and, with the morning sun flooding the hallway from the front door all the way back to the little rear room, photographed the scene.