John Deery wrote to a letter to his sister on April 17, 1865, telling her that a gloom and horror such as he never imagined before had settled over Washington following the president’s death.

Deery described what he saw from his seat at Ford’s Theatre after the shot sounded:

“The murderer rushed across the stage in the direction of my seat,” he wrote. “If I had a pistol, I could have shot him dead. I am only sorry that I had not.”

(Source: Ford’s Theatre files)

President Lincoln’s favorite fruit was the apple.

There’s no evidence he ate lunch on April 14, 1865, but he did eat an apple.

(Source: A. Lincoln: His Last Hours by W. Emerson Reck)

President Lincoln, who kept a volume of Shakespeare on his desk at the Executive Mansion, recited Shakespeare in the woods as a boy.

Abraham Lincoln and his friend Jack Kelso would perform Shakespeare from the river rocks as they fished. Although Lincoln didn’t like fishing, he loved reciting Shakespeare.

F.B. Carpenter, an artist who lived at the White House for six months, often overheard the president reciting Shakespeare aloud. He said Mr. Lincoln was good enough to be employed as a Shakespearian actor if he didn’t already have a job.

Shakespeare was so popular in Lincoln’s time that people would use his quotes without quotation marks, thinking that everyone would know a line from Shakespeare when they saw one.

Source: James Dickey, UCLA at Folger Shakespeare Library’s site folger.edu

John Matthews, an actor who grew up with John Wilkes Booth, ran into his childhood chum on Pennsylvania Avenue on April 14, 1865. Booth asked him to mail a letter to a newspaper editor for him if he didn’t see him the next day.

Matthews forgot all about the letter in his overcoat pocket until it fell out onto the floor — after the assassination. Matthews ripped open the letter, realized it was Booth’s confession and manifesto, and prompty burned it until it was unreadable.

He told his priest about the letter. Fr. Francis Boyle, a politically savvy assistant pastor, suggested Matthews skip to Canada immediately and stay there.

Sources: Newspaper accounts and “A Parish for the Federal City” by Morris J. MacGregor

In the days before Secret Service, President Lincoln often walked around Washington City alone. When his wife complained about him walking alone through parts of the city with names such as “Murderer’s Bay,” he agreed to arm himself.

Sort of.

When he remembered it, he carried a thick oak stick.

The ferrule — the part of the stick that came in contact with the ground — was an iron bolt from the Merrimac. The head was a bolt from the Monitor.

He almost never carried it.

He told reporter Noah Brooks, “Mother has got a notion in her head that I shall be assassinated. And, to please her, I take a cane when I go over to the War Department at night, when I don’t forget it.”

Source: “A. Lincoln: His Last Hours” by W. Emerson Reck

Like every other family in America, one of the Lincoln family’s favorite road trips was to Niagara Falls.

Their first trip was in July 1857 when Tad was four, Willie was seven and Robert was 14. They stayed at the Cataract House, a fine hotel built tight against the 164-foot-high American falls. The four-story white hotel with green trim was built to last with two-foot-thick walls. It’s verandas overlooked the falls.

The hotel motto was “Famous as the Falls.” Nearly every president of the U.S. signed the register, along with Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and, later, John D. Rockefeller. The Lincolns signed it, “A Lincoln and family.”

The Lincolns returned to Niagara when they traveled from Springfield, Ill., to Washington, D.C., for his 1861 inauguration. They stopped in Buffalo, where they were the guests of former President and Mrs. Millard Fillmore.

Source: “Abraham Lincoln on the Niagara Frontier” by Julia Gates Greene, 1930.

The Lincolns did not ride to Ford’s Theatre in the often-pictured black carriage. Their carriage was a stunning dark green with maroon, white and gold detailing and a small but elaborately drawn cursive monogram on each door.

It featured silver candle lamps, silver door handles and a set of stairs that sprang forward automatically when the coachman pulled the door handle.

Robert Todd Lincoln inherited the carriage after his father’s death, but he didn’t keep it for long. He sold it to Dr. F. B. Brewer of New York. When Dr. Brewer was ready to sell in 1889, carriage maker Clement Studebaker snatched it up for the collection at H&C Studebaker Co., a precursor of the Studebaker Motor Company.

The carriage was often on display, but, by the time conservators at the Studebaker National Museum began working on it in the early 2000s, it was so deteriorated that  even they thought it was black.

They gradually uncovered the colorful carriage now on display at the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, IN.

Sources: Interviews, USA TODAY, Studebaker National Museum website.

Not all members of the cast of Our American Cousin were onstage or backstage when John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, hopped the ballustrade of the presidential box and raised his bloody dagger in front of an astonished audience.

Some cast members were relaxing in the theater’s green room — now the site of the National Park Service’s office suite.

They couldn’t see any of the action, but W.J. Ferguson, the theater’s call boy, said actors who saw nothing until the event was practically over came forward with striking testimonies of what they said they had “seen.”

Samuel Seymour wasn’t concerned about President Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. Sitting in the audience at Ford’s Theatre, he didn’t even realize the president had been shot.

It was John Wilkes Booth who elicited the sympathies of the 5-year-old Baltimore boy,  attending the play with his godmother. He wondered if the actor was hurt when he suddenly dropped from the presidential box.

Seymour, at age 96, appeared on TV’s “I’ve Got A Secret” show in 1956. His secret: “I Saw John Wilkes Booth Shoot Abraham Lincoln.”

Seymour, like most people in the theater, didn’t actually see the shooting.

Like most other theatergoers that night, he did see Booth alight on stage, wobble and right himself.

Hear him tell it on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jgGX1v4YFo

Congressman Abraham Lincoln donated  $10 to Irish famine relief in 1847 — the equivalent of several hundred dollars today.

Christine Kinealy, a professor at Drew University in New Jersey, discovered Lincoln’s name on a list of contributors.

The Great Hunger, which killed almost 1 million Irish, was the first national disaster to attract international fundraising efforts, Prof. Kinealy writes.

Although the British wouldn’t move to allieviate the suffering of the Irish people they taxed, thousands of others around the world did — including the future president, an Ottoman sultan, and an  impoverished Choctaw Indian tribe.

Shortly after he arrived in Washington, D.C., Congressman Lincoln attended a  meeting where letters from Irish women were read  aloud. They described coffinless starvation victims surrounded by family members who were screaming, not because of their sorrow but because of the agony of their extreme hunger. Their stories moved Mr. Lincoln to help.

Other donors included Pope Pius IX, Tsar Alexander II and American President James Polk, who gave $50.

Prof. Kinealy’s book “Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers” will be published by Network Educational Press in August, 2013.

President Lincoln had no Irish ancestors, but Mary Todd Lincoln’s paternal great-grandparents emigrated from County Longford in 1737.

Sources: Drew Magazine. IrishCentral.com, IrishAmerica.com