According to LompocRecord.com, last October, letters and memorabilia were found from Leonard Swett, an Illinois attorney and confidant of President Abraham Lincoln. Swett’s granddaughter, Laura Burnham, lived and died in Santa Maria. Her estate bequeathed the scrapbooks to the museum.
The letters, which were authenticated by multiple historians including some from the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill., are either from or to the likes of Lincoln, Swett, Secretary of State William H. Seward, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. George Armstrong Custer, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, New York newspaper publisher Thurlow Weed, Supreme Court Justice David Davis and others.