Tickets to Ford’s Theatre on the night Lincoln was assassinated sell for $262,500
A pair of front-row balcony tickets to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 — the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth — has sold at auction for $262,500, according to a Boston-based auction house.
The tickets are stamped “Ford’s Theatre, APR 14, 1865, This Night Only.” They bear the imprint “Ford’s Theatre, Friday, Dress Circle!” on the left and are filled out in pencil with the section (“D”) and seat numbers (41 and 42), according to RR Auction.
The handwritten seat assignments and the circular April 14th-dated stamp match those found on other known authentic tickets, including a used ticket stub in the collection of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, auction officials said.
The Harvard stub, which consists of just the left half of the ticket, is the only other used ticket known to exist, with similar seat assignments filled out in pencil and a stamp placed identically to the ones on the tickets auctioned off Saturday.
Images from “The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln.” Edited by Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.
Just after 10 p.m., during the third act of the play “Our American Cousin,” Booth entered the presidential box at the theater in Washington and fatally shot Lincoln.
As Lincoln slumped forward in his seat, Booth jumped onto the stage and fled out a back door. The stricken president was examined by a doctor in the audience and carried across the street to Petersen House, where he died early the next morning. Booth evaded capture for 12 days but was eventually tracked down at a Virginia farm and shot.
Also sold at Saturday’s auction was a Lincoln-signed first edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which fetched nearly $594,000.
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