![]() For example, in the case of Andrew Jackson, the President’s son replied that his father would do it if he hadn’t just gotten a haircut he later sent Browne a when the hair had grown back enough. Browne, who died shortly before the Civil War, built his collection of hair from 13 of the first 14 presidents (except Millard Fillmore) by writing letters directly to presidents or people who knew them. ![]() Philadelphia lawyer and amateur naturalist Peter A. Though he put out a call for submissions -“Those having hair of Distinguished Persons, will confere a Favor by adding to this Collection” - his reasons for collecting the hair haven’t been found in any of his writings, according to Bird, who wrote about it in Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The National Museum of American History’s collection has a wooden display of hair of presidents from George Washington to Franklin Pierce, which was collected by John Varden in the 1850s. That didn’t occur to people until the eve of the Civil War.” Today you might describe it as vandalism, but at that time, there wasn’t the idea that you’d preserve a whole estate. “You had people taking an acorn from grave or traveling around the country shooting columns at capitals and taking little bits and pieces home. “If you went to Mount Vernon when Washington was alive, you were almost obligated to take out a pen knife and get a piece of it,” says Larry Bird, a retired curator at the National Museum of American History who’s written about its collection of presidential hair. today, in previous centuries it was normal to want to take home a physical piece of an experience. Much more so than is the case in the U.S. The practice of collecting hair was also part of a larger concept about proper ways to mark special events and people. There are accounts of Martha Washington wearing a locket of her husband’s hair, and even cutting off a piece directly from his head when the wife of one of his officers asked for it after the inauguration of his successor John Adams. A March 18, 1778, letter indicates that Washington himself sent some of his hair from his camp at Valley Forge to the daughter of the New Jersey Governor William Livingston when she requested some. Lear described cutting off a chunk of the former Revolutionary War General’s hair in an account of the burial, according to Robert McCracken Peck, curator and keeper of the collection of hair at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Some came directly from his Philadelphia barber in the 1780s, Martin Pierie, others from his secretary and aide Tobias Lear, who was tasked with “distributing presidential relics to friends and admirers” after the first American President’s death. Samples of his hair are scattered nationwide. For as long as there have been American presidents, people have wanted their hair.Įven before George Washington was elected, he was getting hit up. ![]() The woman who came across that envelope had no idea it in her family until she stumbled upon it while cleaning out the Texas home of her late mother she thinks her mother’s ancestor, a judge in Washington, D.C., may have acquired it somewhere down the line.Īnd Lincoln isn’t alone. That backstory comes down to modern times via a note believed to have been inscribed by one of Gardner‘s children on the envelope in which the hair was found - it reads, straightforwardly, “Lincoln’s Hair: Cut off by undertaker and given to my father” - and is supported by a 1926 letter from a noted collector of Lincoln memorabilia. The roughly three-inch-long strands of hair are thought to come from the private collection of the famous Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner, who may have received it from Lincoln’s undertaker after the April 14, 1865, assassination of the President at Ford’s Theatre. One example of that concept hits the auction block this weekend: 25 strands of hair believed to have come from Abraham Lincoln. The same was true for the Commander-in-Chief. Long before camera phones made it possible to quickly snap a memento of a person, before the invention of photography even, collectors were snipping hair to keep as reminders of their friends and loved ones. But some people take that idea literally. Everyone wants a piece of the President of the United States.
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