The Chicago Historical Society's collection includes two stained dress fragments associated with Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

A white silk fragment is attributed to Clara Harris, the young woman sharing the Lincoln's box seat at the Ford's Theatre the night of the assassination. A brief note describes the fragment as a remnant of a sleeve lining.

Her fiancée and stepbrother, Henry Rathbone, was also a guest in the presidential box and tried to seize assassin John Wilkes Booth after the fatal shot was fired. Booth slashed Rathbone's arm with a long knife from shoulder to elbow, nearly severing an artery and several veins. Bleeding profusely, Rathbone asked Major Potter, an army paymaster seated nearby, to help him escort Mary Lincoln and Clara across the street to the Petersen's boarding house, where Lincoln had been carried. Soon after they arrived, Rathbone fainted in the hallway from loss of blood. (GOOD 43) Clara wrapped a handkerchief tightly over his wound to staunch the flow of blood before the major was sent home in a carriage.

Clara stayed with Mary Lincoln during the long vigil at the Petersen's house, comforting her friend in a parlor adjacent to the bedroom where Lincoln lay dying.

In a letter to a friend she later wrote:

Poor Mrs. Lincoln all through that dreadful night would look at me with horror and scream, Oh! My husband's blood, my dear husband's blood - which it was not, though I did not know it at the time. The brain was instantly suffused. (HOLZER 15)

Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone.