Two Tickets to History Sell for Six Figures

On the evening of April 14, 1865, playgoers settled into their seats at Ford’s Theater in Washington to see a production of the comedy “Our American Cousin.” It was an exciting night, because President Abraham Lincoln was in attendance, sitting in a private box with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Around 10:15 p.m., the actor Harry Hawk, playing Asa Trenchard, said the line, “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal; you sockdologizing old man-trap!” It got a big laugh, as it did every night. And masked by the noise, an assailant, John Wilkes Booth, fatally shot the president.

It was a momentous night in American history. And afterward, the theater lovers in seats D41 and D42 decided to save their tickets.

Those tickets were sold at auction on Saturday by RR Auction of Boston for $262,500, including the auction house fee. The house had listed the estimated sale price before the auction as “$100,000+”.

The auction house said the seller was a collector who bought the tickets in 2002 for $83,650 at Christie’s as part of a sale of historical documents owned by the magazine publisher and politician Malcolm S. Forbes, who purchased them in 1992. The house said that the buyer this weekend had not given permission to be identified.

The green tickets read “Dress Circle!” with an exclamation point for emphasis, and have the row and seat numbers handwritten on them. The date of the performance is stamped on them in ink. The right sides of the tickets are torn, as if by a ticket taker, and read “Give this portion of the Ticket for entrance to the Door-keeper.”

Few tickets from that night are known to remain, the two auction houses reported. Some of the handful that do are owned by Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Ford’s Theater, the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who collects assassination memorabilia, was one of the bidders on Saturday. The tickets are “as close as you can get to that evening,” he said. “The paper is an eyewitness to history.” He did not win the auction. “I was out long before,” he said. “I realistically didn’t have a shot.”

Mr. Zaid, who has done legal work for RR and other auction houses, but was bidding as a private citizen with his own money, said that only a few items tied to the assassination that were likely to be available to the public would be as precious. He cited wanted posters of Booth and other conspirators, and the purported key to open the box the president sat in, which was recently sold at auction.

Based on old seating charts, the dress circle seats would have been across from Lincoln’s private box, potentially giving the occupants a view of the calamity or at least the aftermath, when Booth jumped onto the stage.

The identities of the original occupants of D41 and D42 are now unknown. They would have paid somewhat less than $262,500 for their seats: Dress circle tickets that night went for 75 cents.