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She slept in the murdered Lincoln’s bed

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I have a bright cheerful home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. For the 30 years that I have lived there, I have loved every corner of it. Except for one. The antique walnut spool bed in our guest room.

For the years after purchasing it at an auction, the bed brought sadness to me every time I looked at it. Finally, I painted it pearl white. It never quite broke the shivering spell. When I slept in it myself upon occasion, I would endure a night of heavy, restless sleep.

Then one day, all of a sudden, I knew why.

It was an exact duplicate of a bed in which I slept many years ago in a small back room of an old brick house on Tenth Street NW in Washington, D.C. Opposite this house stood an old square-faced building that had been a Baptist church in the early 1800s. During the Civil War, it had been converted into a theater, Ford’s Theater.

The little brick house where I stayed was originally a boarding house owned by William Peterson. On the first floor, easily accessible and in the rear of the house, overlooking a yard filled with lilac bushes, was one of Peterson’s most frequently occupied rooms because of its convenience.

John Matthews, an actor, rented the room at one time, while he was in a show playing at the theater across the street. On one occasion, he was visited by a fellow actor who stretched his handsome frame out along the elaborate coverlet and chatted while smoking a pipe. That man was John Wilkes Booth.

The bed was only beginning to make history.

One Friday evening, the 14th of April in the closing of the Civil War, 1865, one of the persons in the Peterson house heard a commotion across the street. The play, “Our American Cousin,” was not yet over, yet the doors were open and people scattering into the street. He opened the door into the mild April air, heavy with the sweet scent of lilacs. He stood on the tiny porch and stared.

Coming out of the theater doors now came a tight knot of men. They were carrying a long, black-garbed form that drooped like a huge wilted pine branch. The man supporting the head of the listless form spoke like a doctor. He warned the others not to jog the form. In minutes they were coming up the porch stairs.
“There! Ahead! That room at the end of the hall!”

The doctor motioned the order with a shake of his head.
The group pushed to the back room, now rented by a young soldier from Massachusetts, William Clark.

The men laid the long form diagonally across the bed, the bed being too short to accommodate him otherwise.

And there, on a low four-posted walnut spool bed that had supported actors, loved ones – and even a murderer – lay dying one of the world’s great men ... Abraham Lincoln.

And there, in that same corner, with the same brownish wallpaper and the same reminiscent odor of lilacs floating in through the open spring windows, that very bed supported me ... many years later.

William Peterson sold his house sometime after the tragedy to a Louis Schade. Schade sold it to the government in 1897. The government preserved it as a memorial to the martyred president. Four years before, a new resident had already moved into the old Peterson house, at the request of the Memorial Association of the District of Columbia: a man named Osborn H. Oldroyd. Oldroyd had been an active fan of Lincoln’s since a young boy, working hard for him in his presidential campaign of 1860. The following year, young Osborn Oldroyd entered the army, little dreaming that his beginning collection of Lincoln memorabilia would someday become one of the world’s greatest and largest.

During the war years he met and became close friends with George Rowe in the Union forces. They became such fast friends through the long years to follow that George Rowe’s children and grandchildren came to be a part of him and his own family. After George’s death, Osborn Oldroyd kept George’s family even closer to his heart. George’s grandchildren loved nothing better than their visits to the little old brick house on Tenth Street NW.

Except the youngest, myself.

A great sadness would come over me whenever I entered his house. Giving me the great honor of sleeping in the very bed and room where Lincoln died, gave me a sense of awe, yes, but an unspeakable sadness.

To this day I can see the brown-toned striped wallpaper, the pictures on the wall – “The Village Blacksmith,” and a photograph of Rosa Bonheur’s “Horse Fair.” There were two smaller pictures, too ... one of “The Stable” and one of a “Barn Yard.”

Mr. Peterson must have liked horses, I decided.

Surely, Mr. Lincoln did too. But he never saw these pictures I reflected while I was lying in that bed on several occasions. Mr. Lincoln never saw the pictures, nor the wallpaper, nor the shivering gaslight just as I was seeing them. He never realized that more than 60 people that came in and out of the room that fateful night. He never saw the ashen face, nor heard the cries of Mrs. Lincoln. By 7:22 the morning of April 15, 1865, he was dead.

All these things he never saw.

But I saw them in the very air of that room where I slept in that be-shadowed bed.

Today that bed stands in the Chicago Historical Society.

But on sad April days when the rain is falling softly, the old spool bed in my Bucks County house tells the same heartbreak story of the murder of a man named Lincoln ... and of his slow death in a little back room in a brick house on Tenth Street in Washington, D.C.

Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey wrote this story in 1979 and submitted it to Reader’s Digest, but it was rejected. She was the author of “Ghosts in the Valley” books, the first published in 1971. She initiated the Ghost Tours of New Hope in the early 1980s. Her daughter, Lynda Plott, a recent contributor to the Herald, discovered this tale recently, tucked away in a cabinet in her home in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

On April 21, the Lincoln coffin was taken by honor guard to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot. At least 10,000 people witnessed the train’s departure from Washington. It stopped at cities along the way to Springfield, Ill. A public viewing was held April 22 in Philadelphia.


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