Osborne Hamline Ingham Oldroyd

                        (1842-1930)

   Osborn Hamline Ingham Oldroyd, whose initials intentionally spelled OHIO, was recognized as an authority on Abraham Lincoln. He was born in 1842 in Mount Vernon, Ohio, where his father owned a store. As a young man Osborn managed a newsstand in the corner of the store.

   During his service in the Civil War he developed an intense interest in the life of President Abraham Lincoln which became a near obsession in his later collecting and writing.

   In 1861 Oldroyd enlisted in the Union Army and was mustered out in 1865 for health reasons. He returned to Ohio and became the Steward of the National Soldiers' Home in Dayton.

   In 1873 Oldroyd married Lida A. Stoneberger. The couple had one daughter. The Oldroyd family moved to Springfield, Illinois, where they rented the old home of President Lincoln. In 1884 they turned the home into the Lincoln Museum, where they charged the public to view the Oldroyd Lincoln Memorial Collection. In 1893 Lincoln's son, Robert, turned the home over to the State of Illinois, and Oldroyd moved his collection to the Peterson House in Washington, across the street from Ford's Theater, where Lincoln had died.

   His writings on Lincoln were meticulous, involving many first-person interviews with those associated with Lincoln's life and death. In 1925 he sold his entire collection of Lincoln memorabilia to the U.S. Government. Many of the items from his massive collection are now part of the Lincoln Exhibits at Ford's Theater. Osborn Oldroyd died in 1930.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Lincoln Memorial: Album Immortelles. 1883

A Soldier's Story of the Siege of Vicksburgh. 1885

Words of Lincoln. 1895

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln . . . . 1901

Abraham Lincoln Centenary (1809-1909). 1908

The Poet's Lincoln. 1915