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1928–2008
Origin: The Lincoln National Life Insurance Company was founded in Fort Wayne in 1905 and named — with his son Robert Todd Lincoln's blessing, in the usual telling — for Abraham Lincoln. In 1928 the company's president, Arthur F. Hall, created the Lincoln Historical Research Foundation to collect Lincoln material, and the collection was displayed for decades at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne.
What it held: When the museum closed, the collection was valued at more than 20,000,000 dollars and described as the world's largest private collection of Lincoln material: 350 signed documents, about 5,000 nineteenth-century photographs, 7,000 prints, 18,000 rare books and pamphlets, 200,000 clippings and 350 sheet-music titles — among them a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and one of the thirteen signed copies of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Sources:
- Journal Gazette, 4 March 2008 — the museum's closing and the collection's standing.
- Rare Book Hub — the collection's contents at the museum's closing.
- The Lincoln Collection (lincolncollection.org) — the foundation's 1928 creation under Arthur F. Hall.