Chair Lincoln sat in at Fords Theatre

After the president arrived at Ford's Theatre and acknowledged the audience, he rested his gangly frame in a high-backed, walnut rocking chair upholstered in a plush red fabric. An unsuspecting Lincoln sat in this chair as Booth quietly approached from behind and fired his shot into the back of the president's head. After the murder, authorities removed the chair from the theater as evidence. The widow of theater co-owner Harry Ford reclaimed the chair from the Smithsonian Institution in 1929, and another man named Ford, no relation, bought it at auction. Automotive tycoon Henry Ford purchased the piece for his new museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where he housed it in a transported Illinois courthouse building in which Lincoln practiced law in the 1840s. (The Henry Ford Museum also possesses the limousine in which President John F. Kennedy was riding when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.)