Lincoln’s stovepipe hat could be sold to ease debt
An Illinois nonprofit bearing Abraham Lincoln’s name is so deep in debt that it is considering selling some of the 16th president’s possessions, including one of his iconic stovepipe hats and bloodstained gloves from the night of his assassination.
In 2007, the private nonprofit, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, in Springfield, Ill., borrowed US$23 million to purchase an expansive collection of Lincoln artifacts from a private collector. More than a decade later, the foundation has more than $9 million remaining on the loan, Carla Knorowski, the foundation’s CEO, said.
For 11 years, the state-run Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has had access to the collection, and that organization’s leaders say their priority is to keep the items available for public viewing.
“Prior to our purchase of these items, the only way you would have ever seen the hat or the gloves would be to have known the collector,” Knorowski said. “And know her well enough to knock on her door.”
Other headliners in the collection of 1,400 artifacts include locks of Lincoln’s hair, his presidential seal, unpublished letters to his wife, pages with scrawled arithmetic from when he was a boy and the quill that sat on his desk the night he was shot in 1865.
The foundation has tried to raise the rest of the money by pleading with potential donors and asking state government officials to disburse millions of dollars in grants to save the collection, Knorowski said. The foundation’s staff began a GoFundMe fundraiser in May, which has garnered only a fraction of the funds needed before the loan must be paid in full in October 2019.
On Wednesday, the foundation’s board agreed to start the search for auction houses. This doesn’t mean artifacts will go on the market any time soon, however. The foundation is starting the process now because it can take several months, Knorowski said.
Before the foundation acquired these items, they were part of what was considered the largest privately held collection of Lincoln-related artifacts in the world, according to the museum. The collector, Louise Taper, has had a passion for Lincoln since the 1970s.