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Vanity Plot?               

Anxious to display something, anything which had touched the great man for the Lincoln Bicentennial, in 2007 the Kentucky Historical Society spent $19,000 on a pair of earrings which may, or may not, have belonged to Lincoln’s wife.

The earrings history is sketchy. Basically, it’s a letter from a guy who once owned them, saying he was sure they are the real deal, he just wasn’t sure how.

The scandel has allowed Illinois, Kentucky’s sworn enemy in the Lincoln-sphere, to sneer.

“‘That’s not much of a provenance,” said Thomas Schwartz, director of research at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois…It’s not enough that a collector has a hunch, especially if he can’t even provide the person that he purchased it from.“

We do know that Mary Todd Lincoln was a proven earring wearer.

The earrings may now join Kentucky’s other famously fake Lincoln artifact: the replica birthplace cabin which now graces Kentucky’s entry in the US Mint’s parade of state quarters.

Cabin Fever!