Lawyer Helps Smithsonian Find Secret Message on Abe Lincoln's Gold Watch

We’ve had so much bad news in the legal industry recently (layoffs announced nearly daily) we thought we would lighten things up a bit and share this tidbit, courtesy of ABA Journal:

On the day the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, in a salvo that began the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln’s gold pocket watch happened to be in a repair shop in the Washington, D.C., area.

So, the watchmaker later told his family–and, in 1906, the New York Times–he wrote a secret message on the inner workings. Passed down through the generations in the watchmaker’s family, the story intrigued Douglas Stiles, his great-great-grandson, who practices real estate law in Waukegan, Ill., near Chicago. Stiles found the old New York Times article, and alerted the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, which was given the watch in 1958, recounts the Washington Post.

The rest of the story can be found here.