Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president to hold a patent.

He received Patent 6469 for “A Device for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals” in 1849.

The invention was a set of bellows, a larger version of fireplace bellows, that attached to the hull of a ship just below the water line. The idea was the bellows would be filled with air when the ship reached a shallow spot, and the air would make the ship float higher. It was never commercially produced.

A Springfield mechanic helped design the model, which Congressman Lincoln  whittled with his own hands.  A replica is on display at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History. The original is too fragile to display.

Source: americanhistory.so.edu

Ford’s Theatre started out in life as a church.

The large brick building was constructed in 1833 as the home of the First Baptist Church of Washington.

When Catholic, Lutheran and Evangelical immigrants moved into the neighborhood, the Tenth Street Baptists decided to sell and merge with another Baptist congregation.

The building sat vacant until John T. Ford leased it for use as a theater in December 1861. The theater was greeted with protests from citizens, who thought no good would come from turning a house of God into a house of entertainment.

After some trial shows, Ford decided he could make a go of it despite the nay-sayers.

He renovated the building and reopened it as Ford’s Antheneum in March 1862. That December it was gutted by an accidental fire.

Ford still believed his theater could work. On August 27, 1863, he opened a well-engineered modern theater with a seating capacity of 2,500. Ford’s New Theatre was a runaway success until John Wilkes Booth shot the president.

Ford tried to reopen after the assassination, but Secretary of War William Stanton shut him down. The government leased the building for $1,500 a month, until Congress agreed to buy it for $88,000 in 1866. It added floors for use as offices.

The building’s string of bad luck wasn’t over. Without warning, at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 9, 1893, all three floors fell like a house of cards after a basement support gave way.

Employees and their desks slid into the breach. Every window was blown out. A cloud of dust rose to the roof. Twenty-two were killed; 68 were injured.

Source: Ford’s Theatre files and Ford’s Theatre.org

Gen. James R. O’Beirne had already won the Medal of Honor before he assisted Secretary William Stanton on assassination night and pursued John Wilkes Booth.

O’Beirne, a lawyer and an Irish immigrant, won his medal for his bravery at Chancellorsville in 1863, where he was a captain with a New York regiment nicknamed “The Irish Rifles.”

He was shot through the lungs, shot in the leg, hit by shells on both sides of his head and left on the battlefield for three days.

During the war, Gen. O’Beirne served as provost marshal for the District of Columbia. Aftewards he was appointed register of wills in Washington, D.C. For many years, he was the Washington correspondent for the New York Herald. Then he moved back to New York City, where he was in charge of immigration at Ellis Island.

He died in 1917 at age 77.

Source: Editor and Publisher magazine, Feb. 24, 1917, and  Ford’s Theatre files.

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.