Secret Revealed

Smithsonian Institution/Associated Press

Abraham Lincoln’s gold pocket watch, which contains a message secretly engraved by a watchmaker.
NYTimes:

“Jonathan Dillon April 13- 1861 Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. J Dillon,” the brass underside of the watch movement reads. The inscription continues: “April 13- 1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.”

The story of the engraving had been passed down through the years by descendants of Jonathan Dillon, the watchmaker, without ever being verified. Then recently one of his great-great-grandsons, Douglas Stiles, a lawyer from Waukegan, Ill., discovered an April 1906 article in The New York Times in which Mr. Dillon described making the engraving. In the article Mr. Dillon, then 84, recounted that he was working at M. W. Galt & Company, a watch shop on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, in April 1861 when the shop’s owner, Mr. Galt, hurried upstairs to tell him, “War has begun; the first shot has been fired.”

“At that moment I had in my hand Abraham Lincoln’s watch, which I had been repairing,” Dillon told The Times, adding that he later learned it was the first watch that Lincoln ever owned. An immigrant from Waterford, Ireland, he told The Times, “I was the only Union sympathizer working in the shop.”