A hush fell over the room as the watchmaker halted his work. A
partially-dismantled pocket watch that once belonged to
President Abraham Lincoln gleamed in his hands. He looked up
from his task and pushed a visor, fitted with magnifying glasses
for detailed work, up onto the top of his head. “The moment of
truth has come!” he boomed. I waited, perched on the edge of my
seat, for a verdict—was there really a secret message inscribed
inside the watch? And if so, what did it say? Lincoln himself
never knew of the message he carried in his pocket. In fact,
museum curators had been unaware of the possibility of any such
inscription until Doug Stiles, great-great-grandson of
watchmaker Jonathan Dillon, phoned to corroborate a story that
had been passed down for generations in the Dillon family.
Here’s how the story went: Jonathan Dillon was working for M.W.
Galt and Co. in 1861 when the owner of the shop announced that
the first shot of the Civil War had been fired at Fort Sumter.
In an interview with the New York