Bloody Flag Said to Have Cushioned Lincoln’s Head

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 Theater. Other scholars agree.

The flag is at the tiny Pike County Historical Society museum, which draws 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% authentic, but we are 95% sure that the flag is authentic.”

The flag was given to the museum in 1954 by V. Paul Struthers, whose mother was a cast member of “Our American Cousin,” the play Lincoln was watching when he was shot on April 14, 1865.

Struthers’ grandfather also was an actor and a part-time stage manager at Ford’s Theater.

Garrera is convinced that Struthers had nothing to gain by making up the story. “This man saw the flag as practically a holy symbol,” he said.

Garrera also discovered that at least two of the flags decorating the theater that night were reported missing, and believes one could easily have been used to cushion the president’s head.

Tests confirmed that blood on the flag is human, but DNA testing to confirm the blood as Lincoln’s is unlikely, he said.

“You could fit all the existing biological remains of Abraham Lincoln in one hand,” Garrera said.

Larger museums need not bother asking to borrow the flag, said Barbara J. Buchanan, president of the all-volunteer historical society.

“This flag belongs to us, and it will never leave this museum,” she said. “We’ve nurtured it and cared for it, and this is where the family wanted it.”