WASHINGTON — The flashlight beam lit up the interior of Abraham Lincoln’s left boot, and there at the bottom was the smooth and shiny indentation made by the president’s heel.
When the light hit a maroon section of the hide, bootmaker Michael Anthony Carnacchi whispered: “Aha. There’s your original color.”
A small group of National Park Service curators and conservators craned to peer inside — and, in a way, peer back in time, to the night in 1865 when Lincoln pulled on his boots and walked to the carriage that took him to Ford’s Theatre, where he was assassinated.
It was a solemn moment this week when Carnacchi, along with Park Service museum curator Gloria Swift and other Park Service experts, probed the items labeled “Boots, Lincoln’s” on the 1966 catalog card. Lincoln’s are among the nation’s most famous surviving boots, along with those of Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee.
