Second Friday Lecture: A Game of Whist: An Alleged Sheboygan Connection to Lincoln’s Assassin

Helen Brainard Cole was one of Sheboygan’s leading celebrities in the early 1900s. Through numerous interviews she repeatedly told her reminiscences about being a nurse during the Civil War at a Washington, D.C. hospital, where she frequently interacted with President Lincoln during his hospital visits. Her tales of seeing Lincoln became legendary. Another involved her association with Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, who she claimed she played cards with just weeks prior to the assassination. This program dives into many questions surrounding these stories. What did she remember of her frequent interactions with Booth? Did he reveal anything? How did Helen Cole become an intimate of America’s most beloved president and most hated presidential assassin?