History & local legend
Abraham Lincoln spent the night of February 14, 1861, at Pittsburgh’s Monongahela House while traveling to Washington for his inauguration. The hotel stood near the Smithfield Street Bridge, and its walnut bed became a prized connection to the future president.
Pittsburgh lore gives the bed a more troubling distinction: James Garfield and William McKinley supposedly slept in it too. Because all three presidents were later assassinated, the shared bed acquired a reputation as a cursed object. Lincoln’s stay is documented; the other presidents’ nights in the same bed are part of the hotel tradition.
After the hotel was demolished in 1935, its Lincoln furniture went to a county museum and eventually disappeared from public view. In 2006, the bed resurfaced in a maintenance building in South Park. The Heinz History Center later displayed the recovered furniture, bringing a surviving piece of the vanished hotel back into view.
