BOSTON. A pair of front-row balcony tickets to Ford’s Theatre on the fateful night of April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, have been sold at auction for an astounding $262,500, as confirmed by a Boston-based auction house.
These tickets bear the historical date and inscription, “Ford’s Theatre, APR 14, 1865, This Night Only,” and are marked with “Ford’s Theatre, Friday, Dress Circle!” on the left side. They have handwritten details in pencil, specifying section (“D”) and seat numbers “41” and “42,” according to RR Auction.
The handwritten seating assignments and the circular April 14th-dated stamp match the characteristics found on other authenticated tickets, including a used ticket stub housed in the collection of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, according to auction officials.
The Harvard stub, comprising only the left half of the ticket, stands as the sole surviving used April 14th Ford’s Theatre ticket, featuring similar pencil-filled seat assignments and stamps placed identically to those on the tickets auctioned off this Saturday.
On that tragic night, shortly after 10:00 p.m. during the third act of the play “Our American Cousin,” John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and fatally shot President Lincoln.
As Lincoln slumped forward in his seat, Booth leaped onto the stage and escaped through a rear door. The wounded president was attended to by a doctor in the audience and then transported across the street to the Petersen House, where he succumbed to his injuries early the following morning. Booth managed to evade capture for 12 days but was eventually located on a Virginia farm and shot.
In addition to the rare tickets, Saturday’s auction also featured a first edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates personally signed by Lincoln himself, which commanded a substantial sum of nearly $594,000.
Gary P Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
