WASHINGTON — For more than 150 years, Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch has been rumored to carry a secret message, written by a watchmaker named Jonathan Dillon.
Dillon told family members that he had been repairing Lincoln’s watch when news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of what became the Civil War. He left a secret message in the watch to mark the date. Lincoln never knew it was there.
On Tuesday, officials at the Smithsonian Institution, where the watch now resides, carefully opened the watch and pulled out the workings.
Douglas Stiles, Dillon’s great-great grandson, had alerted them to the family legend and then discovered a 1906 New York Times article quoting Dillon as telling the story himself.
Inside, split into three different sections to get around the tiny gears, was this razor-thin etching: “Jonathan Dillon April 13, 1861. Fort Sumter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. Thank God we have a government.”
Stiles was delighted.
“That’s Lincoln’s watch,” he said after putting it down, “and my ancestor wrote graffiti on it!”
