Flag Was Used To Comfort Dying Abraham Lincoln

For decades, skeptics scoffed at claims that a stained U.S. flag in a small, rural museum was used as a pillow for the bleeding head of Abraham Lincoln the night he was assassinated.

Now an amateur scholar says yes, indeed, it is the flag from Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre. Other scholars agree.

The flag is at the tiny Pike County Historical Society museum, which draws only about 1,500 visitors a year in the foothills of the Poconos.

“You expect to find something like this in the Smithsonian or the National Archives,” said Joseph Garrera, a part-time Lincoln researcher and insurance company owner from Newton, N.J. “That’s why no one believed it was in this small-town museum.”

Garrera didn’t believe claims about the flag at first. But after 400 hours of research, he produced a 2-inch-thick report concluding the flag was authentic.

He sent the report to some of the nation’s top Lincoln scholars, who sent letters back agreeing with him, he said.

One of them is Wayne Temple, chief deputy director of the Illinois State Archives, who called it one of the most significant new Lincoln finds in decades.

“And it’s a touching symbol,” Temple said. “Here his head was lying on a folded flag of the union that he gave his life for.”

Garrera adds a cautionary note: “You can never be sure that any historical artifact is 100 percent authentic, but we are 95 percent sure that the flag is authentic.”