“Other than the celebrated stovepipe hat, probably no other object has closer association with the Lincoln story than this portfolio,” said Lincoln Library Director Richard Norton Smith in the August 18 Chicago Tribune.
Tom Heyser, whose parents Albert and Estelle Heyser were Robert Todd Lincoln’s housekeepers in the 1920s and ’30s, said he had kept the portfolio, which resembles a briefcase and is embossed with Lincoln’s name in gold leaf, and the cotton dress in cardboard boxes in his basement. He said his parents had kept them as a financial “security blanket” while living on small Social Security checks.
The value of the portfolio has been estimated at $250,000. Heyser’s parents rejected an offer of $70,000 from publisher Malcolm Forbes to purchase the items in the 1980s. Now that Heyser’s motorcycle dealerships have given him financial security, he decided to carry out his mother’s dying wish to donate them to Illinois.
The Lincoln Library is expected to open this fall. Its completion has already been delayed by more than a year over construction problems.
Posted August 20, 2004.