On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot as he watched a production of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln was sitting in his theater box with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, Clara Harris, and Major Henry Rathbone when John Wilkes Booth entered the box and fired his gun at the back of the president’s head. Lincoln was taken across the street to Peterson House where he remained in a coma for eight hours before dying just before 7:30 the following morning.
Memorials to Abraham Lincoln include city and town names (including the capital of Nebraska), an aircraft carrier, postage stamps, as well as statues and monuments – perhaps the best known being the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Numismatically Abraham Lincoln is remembered on the one-cent coin (since the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1909) and the $5 bill, along with commemorative coins and a variety of medals.
In our upcoming June 2023 Whitman Expo Auction, Stack’s Bowers Galleries is pleased to present one such numismatic tribute – the finest PCGS-graded Proof 1955 Lincoln cent, a virtually flawless example graded Proof-69 Deep Cameo.
