A Bit of History

 A Bit of History

President Abraham Lincoln was attending the Ford Theatre in Washington D. C. The date was April 14^th 1865; Good Friday. President Lincoln was relaxing with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. He was in high spirits as the terrible Civil War was coming to an end. They were in box seats above the stage watching the comedy, Our American Cousin when John Wilkes Booth sneaked into the box and shot President Lincoln behind the his left ear. Mrs. Lincoln cried out, “The President has been shot!”

Seated in the balcony about fifteen feet away from the Presidential box were several young Unon soldiers from the Thompson Battery. They carried President Lincoln’s unconscious body feet first from the theater across the street to a back bedroom of the boarding house owned by William and Anna Peterson and placed him on a back bedroom and placed him on a bed to await the doctor. Mr. Lincoln died the following morning.

Those four young soldiers were aged eighteen and early twenty year olds. An unusual coincidence was that all four of them were from the surrounding areas of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Who were these four young men and what happened to them?

Jabez Griffiths was from McKeesport, Pennsylvania. He died in 1898 from cancer.

William Samples, also hailed from McKeesport died in 1898 after a blast furnace exploded causing him an untold amount of agony until he blessedly passed away.

John Corey from North Versailles was a riverman who drowned in 1884 while working on a coal barge.

Jacob Soles also from North Versailles lost an eye in a coal mining accident before finally succumbing to cancer in 1936 at the age of 90.