WASHINGTON, September 10 — The story begins in a workroom in Springfield, Illinois, in the spring of 1861, with a watchmaker named Jonathan Dillion and the news that Fort Sumter had been shelled. More than a century and a half later, that same watch — Abraham Lincoln’s gold pocket watch, an English works mechanical movement — sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where millions of visitors pass through each year. Only a fraction of the Smithsonian’s political archives is ever on display at one time.
A Spectrum News reporter was allowed inside the archive one recent morning for a rare look at the collection, guided by Lisa Kathleen Graddy, a curator at the museum. The collection essentially began with President George Washington’s christening gown, purchased by the U.S. government in the late 1870s.
Graddy says more than 100,000 items have been added since then, from campaign buttons to banners from the suffragette movement. Sometimes, Graddy jokes, “it’s absolutely scavenging.” She added: “We are the people who will help you clean up the [National] Mall or clean up your campaign headquarters if we can have the thing on the floor. No issue there, no pride involved.
We are happy to get material however we can.”
A pencil, a pair of glasses, and the stories they carry
Every piece has a backstory. Pointing to a giant yellow wooden pencil, Graddy recalled: “A colleague of mine brought that back in 1988 from the New Hampshire primary.
He saw driving down the road a large sign shaped like a pencil mounted to the top of a car, and it said, ‘Write in Ralph Nader.’ And Larry, being the clever soul that he was, immediately started to chuckle and thought, ‘ah, unsafe at any speed,’ and just had to get that object.” Among the items Graddy showed off was a pince-nez — Eleanor Roosevelt’s eyeglasses. Roosevelt likely wore them while reading and writing correspondence from around the country, or at least Graddy likes to think so.
“We sometimes have pieces that are personal, and that might not have been at an historic moment,” Graddy said. “They are a touchstone to talk about all those things that this person did. To talk about [Roosevelt’s] life.
To talk about the life that everyone was leading while she was alive. Objects are the things that link us, they’re the things that allow us to tell stories.” Graddy said it is hard to choose a favorite item — “It’s like who’s your favorite child?” she laughed — but she is partial to one item carried by President Abraham Lincoln: his pocket watch.
“This is the watch that Abraham Lincoln used every day,” she said. Lincoln had purchased the watch following his success arguing a case for a railroad firm during his time in Springfield, Ill., and brought the timepiece with him when he arrived in Washington as president. “I think this is Lincoln’s sort of testament to himself that he’s made it.”
A secret message, and a phone call that confirmed it
The watch had been in the museum’s collection for decades when the Smithsonian featured it in an exhibition celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Publicity around the exhibit led to a phone call from Doug Stiles that got the museum’s attention. Stiles said a family anecdote, passed down from his great-great grandfather Jonathan Dillion, was that Dillion had carved a secret message into the timepiece.
According to Graddy, the watch “had come in to be cleaned, and he was cleaning Lincoln’s watch.
He just finished and was putting it back together when Mr. Galt, the owner, came running from the front of the store into the workroom, announcing that Fort Sumter had been shelled, and they were at war.” She continued: “Great-great grandfather, as he told the story, took the hands and the face back off the watch and carved a secret message in the watch, and he wrote his name and the date that Fort Sumter had been attacked by the rebels, that they were at war, and closed the watch back up.”
The Smithsonian invited Stiles and members of the press to the museum that spring to open the watch to see if there was a secret message inside — and the story turned out to be true.
The inscription includes the date, April 13, 1861, and Dillon’s name, though it was a little different than the way he recounted it to family: “Fort Sumter was attacked by rebels on the above date. Thank god we have a government.”
That last line has stuck with Graddy. “I think about this a lot. I think about him carving ‘thank God we have a government’ in this watch, closing it back up and sending it to the president of the United States. That the president of the United States, for the next four plus years, carried this in his pocket, touched it every day, a talisman, a statement of faith from just a citizen of the United States, a statement of faith in him, in the Union, in the war
