Our story begins in a dark hallway of a deteriorating southern museum going nowhere but south in Jacksonville, Fla.
It will end in a couple of months at a New York auction house.
But of course, the real story stretches back nearly 160 years to Illinois, as the nation wept for the Springfield lawyer many now consider our greatest president.
But first, back to that Florida museum.
It is July 2023, and something is amiss.
Rhonda Hiser, 60, a volunteer docent at the barely inhabitable “Museum of Southern History,” is briskly walking down a little used hallway, when she slams into a bookshelf on wheels secured to a wall.
Hiser, a retired attorney and professional genealogist who had been working at the museum for two weeks, is startled by the sudden grating noise of the anchored bookshelf.
Investigating, she spots something hanging on the wall, hidden behind the bookshelf.
“It was an old, dusty shadow box encasing a large flag,” she said.
What Hiser discovered was an 1865 American presentation flag that she now believes was draped over the coffin of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on the long train trip back to Springfield for his burial.
“I believe it is one of the most important pieces of American history discovered in the 21st century,” said Steve Levine, part of a team of rare arts collectors and flag experts hired to research Hiser’s discovery.
From funeral train to pick-up truck
The train trip carrying Lincoln’s body back home was a route of bereavement, with dozens of stops along the way for an estimated 7 million citizens to mourn the slain Emancipator. The 1,654-mile trek of tears ended in Illinois on May 4, 1865.
“The flag was dated April 14, 1865, the day President Abraham Lincoln was shot; dying early the next morning on April 15,” said Hiser. “These dates and all the original flag ownership signatures are located on the trim (hoist) of the flag and not the flag itself.”
And why was the flag hidden away in the museum primarily housing relics of the Southern Confederacy and the old antebellum South? A statement on an interloper from the North?
“Who knows,” said Hiser, who had just begun to put together a flag research team when the uninhabitable museum was ordered closed months later in August 2023.
“We had to scramble,” said Hiser, who is now listed as president and curator of the museum. She had been keeping the flag in her home, driving it around in her pick-up truck when she was working to prove its authenticity.
The flag was donated to the museum in 1996 by Barnswell Daley and his wife, Anis, close friends of the flag’s previous owner, Clora Worley Conway, who had received it from her mother in 1942.
According to museum paperwork, the Daleys had been given the flag in 1977 from the members of the Conway family, who described it as the flag placed on Lincoln’s coffin.
The flag has been dubbed the “Applegate Flag,” after its original owner, New York physician and Civil War soldier Lewis Applegate. According to Hiser’s research, Applegate went to the same school as the son of a Lincoln pallbearer, New York Sen. Edwin Morgan, which may be a link to Applegate’s mysterious possession of the flag.
Lewis Applegate’s signature and the date on the flag that is believed to have been on Abraham Lincoln’s coffin in his funeral train.
L2 Acquisitions
The flag had been passed down through the Applegate family line until it ended, each recipient following Lewis Applegate’s lead and signing their name to the flag.
‘Applegate flag has the best provenance’
To prove the flag’s provenance, Hiser enlisted Jim Ferrigan, a vexillologist (flag expert) who has advised and consulted for the Smithsonian; Steve Levine and Ron Levine, rare collectible dealers and researchers who are not related but own L2 Acquisitions; as well as owners of the historic Annin flag company, which made and supplied the Civil War flags.
Questions have been raised about the authenticity of other Lincoln artifacts, but Hiser and her team are confident this is the real thing.
“The facts, deductive reasoning and the overall circumstantial evidence allows for the conclusion that this is ONE of the only known surviving Lincoln coffin flags,” Ferrigan told Sneed.
“Of the five dozen or so flags or fragments associated with the assassination and funeral of President Abraham Lincoln, the Applegate flag has the best provenance and unbroken chain-of-possession attached to the 1800s,” he said.
A 1960 fire destroyed the Annin company’s historic records, but according to Ron Levine, the firm sent a letter this year stating: “After viewing the Annin company stamp (on the flag), Brevet major Lewis Applegate’s signature and the flag’s dignified paperwork, Annin flagmakers are inclined to believe the data presented surrounding these facts support the conclusion that this Annin 37 star flag made in NYC in or around 1865 can very well be the flag that draped Lincoln’s coffin.”
On Nov. 22, the “Applegate Flag” will be auctioned off live and online by Guernsey’s Auction House in New York.
Hiser is hoping the proceeds will pay for a new location for the now homeless Florida museum.
“It was hard to let it go from the confines of my house and my pickup truck,” she said. “I may belong to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but my family fell on both sides of the war.”