During Abraham Lincoln's early years in Indiana, he crafted and used a wooden mallet with the initials "A.L." to create furniture. For five generations, the wooden mallet had been a heirloom passed on from parent to children.
On Feb. 9, the Indiana State Museum unveiled the rare relic for public viewing. According to Dale Ogden, the museum's chief curator of cultural history, the artifact is tied to Lincoln and his family's 14 years of living in the state.
The crafting tool is technically called a bench mallet. It is inlaid with square-edged nails that comprise the former president's initials with a period for separation. A series of other nails were driven into the bench mallet to form the year "1829." That's about 187 years ago.
Lincoln would have been 20 years old when the bench mallet was made. He crafted the bench mallet from a splitting maul, a larger tool used to drive metal wedges into logs to split them.
The young Lincoln would have used the bench mallet to drive hand-carved pegs into the Federal-style furniture that he and his father made on the frontier, officials said.
The 11-inch-long bench mallet was put on display at the downtown museum on Feb. 12, Lincoln's 207th birthday.
Tom King, CEO and president of the Indiana State Museum, described the mallet as an incredible and moving discovery because it was crafted by Lincoln's own hands.
Meanwhile, Ogen said he's certain of the bench mallet's authenticity because the family still owns it. They have loaned it to museum for one year.
The bench mallet descended through the family of Barnabas Carter, one of the earliest settlers in the Southwest Indiana county of Spencer. The Carters were neighbors of the Lincoln's after Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham Lincoln, moved his family to Indiana in 1816. The Lincoln family remained in Indiana until 1830 and then moved to Illinois.
Apparently, the bench mallet was the best-hidden secret in Spencer County.
"No one knew about it," said Steve Haaff, an expert on the furniture that Thomas and Abraham made.
For more than 150 years since the former president's assassination, many pieces of furniture and tools allegedly used by him have surfaced with the initials "A.L."; however, some of them may have been owned by someone with the same initials.
