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Some specimens of your Soap have been used at our house and Mrs. L. declares it is a superb article. She at the same time, protests
that I have never given sufficient attention to the ``soap question'' to be a competent judge. Yours truly A. LINCOLN
[1] ALS-F, Genuine Autograph Letters from the Most Distinguished Men of Our Country, Presented to Prof. Gardner, the New England Soap Man (1870). ``Professor'' Daniel Pierce Gardner was an itinerant soap manufacturer and vendor who distributed his wares by means of humorous lectures to which the purchase of a bar of soap was the price of admission. He claimed to be ``a lineal descendant, in an air line, of that glorious Puritan, Awful Gardner, who landed on the everlasting hills of New England from a desolate fishing smack ....'' presumably referring to Thomas Gardner (1592?-1677), one of a number of fishermen who established in 1624 a settlement at the mouth of the Naumkeag River which later became Salem, Massachusetts (see Frank A. Gardner, Gardner Memorial; A Biographical and Genealogical Record .... 1933; and Joseph B. Felts, Annals of Salem, 2 vols., 1845-1849). Although Daniel P. Gardner was announced in the Illinois State Journal (September 28, 1860) as a professor of Brown University, he is not of record at that institution.