BLOOMINGTON, Ill. (AP) – A man may be in line for a $50,000 payday after he opened a box he got for free at an estate sale and discovered three legal documents signed by Abraham Lincoln.
Bloomington Auction Gallery auction manager Jason Penny said one of the Lincoln documents could fetch $12,000 to $20,000 when it’s sold at an auction that begins at 5:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 18.
LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding.
For comparison, another legal document signed by Lincoln brought $15,000 at a recent Springfield auction, Penny said.
Bids on the new discovery will be taken live at 300 E. Grove St. and by phone and via the Internet. The other two documents will be sold later. All three were found in a box that apparently went unsold at a Peoria estate sale, according to Penny.
“They were going to toss it,” he said.
Penny declined to name the man who offered to take the box and later realized the potential value of its contents. Penny said experts at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield authenticated the signature of the document, which dates to 1846 – about a month after Lincoln was elected to the U.S. Congress.
A Tazewell County judge had appointed Lincoln as guardian ad litem to handle the affairs of the heirs of a man named Bailey, who died before the sale of two lots he owned was complete.
Guy Fraker, a Bloomington lawyer and Lincoln scholar who is writing a book, Lincoln’s Ladder to the Presidency: the 8th Judicial Circuit, said the document is from the heyday of Lincoln’s law career, which extended from 1837 to 1860, when he was elected president.
Fraker said similar discoveries are rare, but they do happen because many original legal documents Lincoln signed were taken from courthouses by people doing research or who wanted souvenirs after his assassination.
“It is great that these are found and preserved. We really all own them in a sense,” he said.
In monetary terms, the documents’ value depends on condition and rarity, Penny said.
“Whenever they do come up (for sale), there are a lot of people who want to get their hands on them,” he said. “You’re talking about a part of history. He was a major figure in American history. Not everyone can say they have a piece of history.”
Seven years ago, while arranging an estate sale of a Bloomington man, the Bloomington Auction Gallery discovered a Lincoln document stuck unceremoniously in a pile of papers due to be cast away, Penny said. The winning bid was $10,000.
Penny said it was another example of how people need to be aware of what they have before discarding anything.
“That just makes prices what they are today,” he said. “So many of these documents are lost over time, it only boosts the price.”
View the fully illustrated catalog for Bloomington Auction Gallery’s March 18 sale and sign up to bid absentee or live via the Internet at: https://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/24310.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-CS-03-17-11 0503EDT