The undertaking proved a success, and matters went well until in 1893 the administration changed. For some reason which only those initiated into the mysteries of party government can understand, it was deemed unwise by the party rulers to allow Mr. Oldroyd, who happened to be of the opposing faith, to remain in charge of the Lincoln Home; so he was relieved of his functions as guardian, and a new incumbent selected. One result of the change, which the new administration had probably not counted on, was that, as the collection in the house belonged to Mr. Oldroyd, and not to the State, when he went out that went out too. The intelligent people of Springfield of both parties regretted exceedingly this ludicrous application of party principles to so non-partisan a subject as a collection of Lincoln relics; but nothing was done to save the museum, and Mr. Oldroyd was obliged to leave the town where he had struggled with pathetic patience for so many years to get a permanent home for his Lincolniana.
After some casting about he finally determined to remove to Washington, and he was encouraged to this step by several men of the city and government—prominent among whom were Chief Justice Fuller, Dr. Hamlin, a leading clergyman, General Schofield, and the Hon. G. G. Hubbard. These gentlemen had founded a Lincoln Memorial Association; and, renting the house on Tenth Street where Lincoln had died on April 15, 1865, they installed Mr. Oldroyd in it. Their plan was to petition Congress to buy the house and collection, and to appropriate enough for the guardian’s salary. Considerable interest was awakened in the enterprise, and the association, on the strength of this, felt justified in keeping the house open for several months. The appropriation did not come, however, and the gentlemen decided that the expenses could not be kept up indefinitely, and that it would be necessary to close up the exhibit until the heart of Congress could be converted.
The situation was a difficult one for Mr. Oldroyd. He had made the change from Springfield to Washington at large expense to himself, and now he could ill afford to carry on the enterprise alone. But with a pluck and a devotion to his cause which has characterized all his movements he decided to take the burden on himself, rent the house, keep open the museum, and trust to the public to support it. To aid in the undertaking, he compiled and published a small volume—“The Words of Lincoln.” The profits from the sale of this book, together with the small fee charged to enter the museum, are all that now support the undertaking.
The collection whose history has been here sketched is full of curious and interesting articles. Among the personal effects of Mr. Lincoln which Mr. Oldroyd has collected, the most valuable is undoubtedly the tall silk hat which was worn by Lincoln on the night of his assassination. There are several specimens of the plain and homely garments used by Mr. Lincoln in his early days in Illinois. Of household furniture there are many examples. The most touching is, undoubtedly, the simple, old-fashioned cradle in which Mrs. Lincoln, and, if tradition is correct, Mr. Lincoln also, rocked “Tad” and Willie. A wooden settee which stood for years on the veranda of the Springfield house, is exhibited, as well as the cooking-stove which stood in the Lincoln kitchen at the time when the family moved to Washington. Mr. Oldroyd says that he has been offered extravagant sums by stove dealers for this stove, they wanting it presumably to use as an advertisement. Another valuable piece of furniture is the wooden office chair which Mr. Lincoln used when he first began to practise law in 1837. A chair of still greater interest is an old-fashioned haircloth rocker in which he sat in Ford’s Theatre on the night on which he received his death-wound.
Several autograph letters from Mr. Lincoln are owned by Mr. Oldroyd. By far the most interesting specimen of his writing is the short autobiography which he prepared for his friend Jesse Fell before the campaign of 1860. This autobiography was the foundation of all the histories which were issued in such great numbers just before and after his first election.
In Lincoln portraiture the collection is very full, though it is rather from a historical point of view than from an artistic that it is valuable. Mr. Oldroyd has copies of nearly all of the engravings and lithographs issued in Mr. Lincoln’s lifetime. He has also a splendid lot of wood-cuts gathered from newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. In this collection of prints there are numbers of views of the Lincoln family and of various scenes connected with Mr. Lincoln’s public career. From the spring of 1860 until after the funeral, in 1865, there were few issues of the illustrated papers in this country which did not contain something on the President. Mr. Oldroyd has succeeded in getting nearly all of these prints, among them a great many caricatures. He has a full set of “Vanity Fair,” and many of the Currier and Ives lithographs, now so rare. An interesting feature of the collection is the number of curios it contains—campaign documents of various kinds, such as badges, medals, pins, letter paper and envelopes, flags, etc.
The use that was made by advertisers of Lincoln’s face during his Presidency is shown by a case of common articles; there are tomato cans, soap, washing fluid, tobacco pouches, cigarette cases, spruce gum, and many other trivial articles, all enclosed in highly-colored papers bearing portraits of Mr. Lincoln, surrounded by a rail fence or some popular campaign legend.
The only complete collection of the portraits of Lincoln issued by the government which we have ever seen, Mr. Oldroyd owns. Among them is a revenue stamp calling for five pounds of tobacco; another is good for seventy gallons of distilled spirits, a third for four ounces of snuff, and a fourth calls for cigarettes. Lincoln’s head appears on a variety of postage stamps; the four, six, fifteen, and ninety-cent stamps all bear his face. The six-cent stamp of each of the Departments has a head of Lincoln. The old fifty-cent “shin plaster” is exhibited. It was the only one of our scrip issue which bore a head of Lincoln. His picture is also to be found on a ten-dollar greenback, a one-hundred-dollar United States note, and a one-hundred-dollar government bond.
The most valuable portion of the Oldroyd collection is undoubtedly its books, pamphlets, and clippings. The library contains almost all of the biographies which have been issued, a large number of memoirs by contemporaries of Lincoln, and many war records. There are copies of some three hundred different sermons delivered at the time of Lincoln’s death, as well as a great number of the pieces of music composed in his honor.
A precious book in Mr. Oldroyd’s Lincoln library is the Bible owned by Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President. This Bible bears the date of 1798; it undoubtedly went with the Lincolns from Kentucky to Indiana, and was carried from there by them when they moved into Illinois. It was kept in the family of Thomas Lincoln’s step-children until 1892, when it was sold to be exhibited at the World’s Fair. It afterward passed to Mr. Oldroyd.