Next, we have Millard Fillmore’s foot on a keychain…
By In Lexington, Kentucky, somebody coughed up $17,000 on Friday night for what were supposed to be four strands of George Washington’s hair.
Christa Allen, a Colorado woman who once lived in Owsley County, sold them. Allen said she got the hair, which was pressed under glass in a locket and accompanied by a watch, from her father, a Philadelphia attorney.
Jamie Bates, owner of Thompson & Riley, which auctioned the hair, had hoped the auction would bring at least $75,000.
“I’ve never sold George Washington’s hair before; I don’t know,” Bates said before the auction.
Allen told potential buyers how the hair was handed down from person to person since it was clipped from Washington. The Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, looked at Allen’s evidence and gave her its backing.
Eric James, president of The James Preservation Trust, discussed the chain of ownership of the hairs from the time Washington was briefly disinterred and his hair snipped in 1837.
I’m sure there’s all kinds of strange presidential refuse floating around among collectors — fingernails, used handkerchiefs, tiny jars of urine and such — but what I can’t for the life of me figure out is why GW’s casket would have been uncorked in 1837. This isn’t the sort of information that usually appears in presidential biographies, and ten minutes or so with Google have failed to turn up anything even remotely suggestive of an answer.
. . . John in comments spends eleven minutes with Google and discovers the reason for Washington’s bizarre resurfacing in 1837. The official explanation was that his tomb was “rapidly going to decay.” The real reason, as I’m sure everyone would suspect, was that the Whigs were hoping to reanimate him in time for the 1840 election. As it turned out, the party instead got William Henry Harrison, who croaked after a few dozen days in office. The stuffed and electrified corpse of George Washington, disgruntled Whigs were known to claim, would have performed at least as well.