Each year, millions of visitors stream through the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, bearing witness to a trove of items documenting the country’s past. But only a fraction of the Smithsonian’s political archives is ever on display at one time.

The collection essentially began with President George Washington’s christening gown, purchased by the U.S. government in the late 1870s. Lisa Kathleen Graddy, a curator at the museum, says more than 100,000 items have been added since then, from campaign buttons to banners from the suffragette movement. 

Sometimes, Graddy jokes, “it's absolutely scavenging.” She added, “We are the people who will help you clean up the [National] Mall or clean up your campaign headquarters if we can have the thing on the floor. No issue there, no pride involved. We are happy to get material however we can.”

Every piece has a backstory.

“A colleague of mine brought that back in 1988 from the New Hampshire primary,” Graddy said, pointing to a giant yellow wooden pencil. “He saw driving down the road a large sign shaped like a pencil mounted to the top of a car, and it said, ‘Write in Ralph Nader.’ And Larry, being the clever soul that he was, immediately started to chuckle and thought, ‘ah, unsafe at any speed,’ and just had to get that object.”

Graddy allowed a Spectrum News reporter inside the archive one recent morning, for a rare look at the collection. 

“This is a pince-nez,” Graddy explained, holding up Eleanor Roosevelt’s eyeglasses. Roosevelt likely wore them while reading and writing correspondence from around the country — or at least Graddy likes to think so.

“We sometimes have pieces that are personal, and that might not have been at an historic moment,” Graddy continued. “They are a touchstone to talk about all those things that this person did. To talk about [Roosevelt’s] life. To talk about the life that everyone was leading while she was alive. Objects are the things that link us, they’re the things that allow us to tell stories.”

Graddy said it’s hard to choose a favorite item.

“It's like who's your favorite child?” she laughed, but she is partial to one item that was carried by President Abraham Lincoln: his pocket watch.

“This is the watch that Abraham Lincoln used every day,” she said of the gold watch with an English works mechanical movement. Lincoln had purchased the watch following his success arguing a case for a railroad firm during his time in Springfield, Ill. and brought the timepiece with him when he arrived in Washington as president. “I think this is Lincoln's sort of testament to himself that he's made it.”

The watch had been in the museum’s collection for decades when the Smithsonian featured it in an exhibition celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Publicity around the exhibit led to a phone call from Doug Stiles that got the museum’s attention. 

Stiles said a family anecdote, passed down from his great-great grandfather Jonathan Dillion, was that Dillon had carved a secret message into the timepiece.

“It had come in to be cleaned, and he was cleaning Lincoln's watch. He just finished and was putting it back together when Mr. Galt, the owner, came running from the front of the store into the workroom, announcing that Fort Sumter had been shelled, and they were at war,” recalled Graddy. “Great-great grandfather, as he told the story, took the hands and the face back off the watch and carved a secret message in the watch, and he wrote his name and the date that Fort Sumter had been attacked by the rebels, that they were at war, and closed the watch back up.”

The Smithsonian invited Stiles and members of the press to the museum that spring to open the watch to see if there was a secret message inside — and the story turned out to be true. The inscription includes the date, April 13,1861, and Dillon’s name, though it was a little different than the way he recounted it to family. “Fort Sumter was attacked by rebels on the above date. Thank god we have a government.”

That last line has stuck with Graddy.

“I think about this a lot. I think about him carving ‘thank God we have a government’ in this watch, closing it back up and sending it to the president of the United States. That the president of the United States, for the next four plus years, carried this in his pocket, touched it every day, a talisman, a statement of faith from just a citizen of the United States, a statement of faith in him, in the Union, in the war, in the government of the United States. A statement of faith in democracy,” she said, getting a bit emotional. “I can't imagine anything more meaningful, anything more speaking of our faith as Americans, in our country, and our ability to do the right thing — it's amazing to me.”

On Tuesday, the longtime secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch, announced that he plans to retire at the end of the year. The announcement followed months of attacks on the institution by President Donald Trump and his administration that the museums are presenting a view of American history that denigrates the nation’s past. 

The Smithsonian’s leadership has denied the criticism. And while it’s called the political history archive, Graddy says, “What we're really collecting is history, the history of Americans, the history of the nation, most importantly, the way those two interact with each other.”

“It's really the story of Americans' engagement with their country, their engagement with their democracy, and with each other in both creating the nation and sustaining the nation.”

And the Smithsonian plans to keep collecting that history – one artifact at a time.