"Inaccurate reports, erroneous affidavits, journalistic ghosts, and wild imaginings have shrouded in secrecy and intrigue what really happened at Ford's Theatre, April 14, 1865, in Garret's barn, April 26, 1865, and in the days and hours intervening." April 14, 15 and 16 was Easter weekend.

General William T. Sherman commented on a New York Sun, January 23, 1887, article attacking General Ulysses S. Grant's alcoholism which recalled a "foolish, drunken, stupid Grant." Sherman characterizes the author, General Henry Boynton, as "a Coyote, or hyena, scratching up old forgotten scandals, publishing them as something new."

Ray Burdett Griffin, a graduate of Hamilton Law College, 1857, exchanges letters with brothers: James, Marion, Nathan and Norman. James' letters include "colorful comments on Know-Nothings and Republicans." Marion, Twenty-First Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment, March 30, 1865, describes seige preparations at Spanish Fort, Alabama. Nathan, Seventeenth Illinois Infantry Regiment, 1865, provides "interesting close-ups of the South in the last months of the War. Norman's letters, Prescott, Arizona Territory, 1866, describe his mining pursuits and difficulties with Indians.

Treasures, a collection of 8,620 early, rare, and special books on diverse subjects, include among others: a manuscript Book of Hours, a devotional book of a medieval noblewoman, Hartmann Schedel's Liber Cronicarum (1493), Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Galileo Galilei's Dialogue (1632), Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), The Book of Mormon (1830), and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855).