A pair of balcony tickets directly across from President Lincoln’s box in Ford’s Theatre the night he was assassinated were sold at auction for $262,500 recently.
Lincoln was seeing a showing of “Our American Cousin” at the D.C. theater on April 14, 1865, when actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, who was not in the play that night, shot him during a laugh line in the third act. Lincoln was taken to the Peterson House nearby and died the next day.
The two tickets are for seats 41 and 42 (section D) and would have offered a direct line of sight to Lincoln’s assassination, seller RR Auction said in the listing.
The auction house did not disclose the buyer of the tickets.
The used tickets are “exceedingly rare,” RR Auction said, with only one other used ticket from the showing known to have survived — a left-side stub owned by Harvard University. All three tickets have a circular stamp with the date of the show.
The tickets, sold by RR Auction on Saturday, were previously sold out of the Forbes collection by the Christie’s auction house in 2002.
