History & local legend
Philadelphia’s Civil War Library and Museum occupied a townhouse at 1805 Pine Street from 1922 until its closure there in 2008. Union veterans had chartered the institution in 1888, preserving objects connected with their own service and the war they had survived. Its collection included General George G. Meade’s Gettysburg uniform and Abraham Lincoln’s cane from Ford’s Theatre.
A paranormal investigator’s collection, preserved online in 2004, placed a group of ghostly soldiers in the building’s second-floor Lincoln Room. They were said to gather there to play cards, continuing an ordinary soldiers’ pastime inside a museum devoted to their era.
Sources
- PIRA investigator’s Haunted Sites of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, The Civil War Library and Museum, archived 2004
- The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, by Mabel Rosenheck, institution, veterans, holdings and locations
- Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, institutional history and 1934 picture of its Pine Street headquarters
- The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 1, 2008, final open house at the 1805 Pine Street museum
