Taking note of Lincoln photo

CHICAGO — It’s one of the most famous Abraham Lincoln photographs, largely because no one knew the picture of the dead president lying in an open coffin existed for nearly a century until a 14-year-old boy found it.

On Tuesday, Ronald Rietveld — the boy who made the discovery and is now 77 and a retired historian — will donate his original notes about the picture to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.

Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, heard about the photo and ordered it and all prints and negatives destroyed. All were, except for one sent to Stanton.

In the 1950s, Rietveld, a teenager, attended the dedication of a collection of Lincoln-related items at the University of Iowa.

Harry Pratt, the state historian of Illinois, was so impressed with Rietveld that he invited him to Springfield to see Lincoln’s home and tomb. Pratt also let Rietveld look at papers of John Nicolay and John Hay, White House secretaries when Lincoln was president.

Rietveld came upon an envelope sent to Nicolay in 1887 by Stanton’s son, who said he’d found some of his father’s papers and thought Nicolay might want them.

“Then I opened up the folded sheet of plain stationery and there lay a faded brown photograph,” Rietveld wrote in an article that appeared in Abraham Lincoln Online.