These days, collecting the former possessions of one’s heroes is a common practice – this year, Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday Mr President” dress, John Lennon’s hair and even Truman Capote’s ashes all found new owners when they went under the hammer.
Second president John Adams had just such an acquisitive interest in his idols, but a rather different way of obtaining relevant memorabilia.
During a two-month diplomatic trip to England in 1786, he fitted in a tour of English gardens with Thomas Jefferson. On this tour they also visited the home of William Shakespeare in Stratford upon Avon where they saw the “old Wooden Chair in the Chimney Corner, where He sat”.
They then proceeded to cut a chip out of the chair – “according to the custom,” Adams wrote, though there is no evidence that other visitors were aware of the practice.
Of the two visitors, Adams was the more enthusiastic pilgrim, reportedly falling to the ground and kissing it when he reached the birthplace; Jefferson, on the other hand complained that the entrance fee was too high.
The chip itself was later found wrapped in paper with the following notation in Jefferson’s hand: “A chip cut from an armed chair in… Shakespear’s [sic] house at Stratford on Avon, said to be the identical chair in which he usually sat, if true like the relicts [sic] of the saints it must miraculously reproduce itself. Cut by myself in 1785.”
