The Smithsonian Owns a Collection of Presidential Hair Locks
Locks of hair from the first 14 presidents of the United States. (Photo: Smithsonian Institute/National Museum of American History)
This election year, there’s been a lot of analysis about the hair of the presidential candidates, from Donald Trump’s orange hair (“I don’t wear a toupee,” he said) to Bernie Sander’s strategically-brushed balding strands, but apparently the fascination with presidential hair stretches back to our Founding Fathers — and you can find proof at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. The museum owns a piece of display containing locks of hair from the first 14 Presidents of the United States, entitled “Hair of the Presidents, Washington, D.C., 1855,” the brainchild of John Varden, an early curator of the Smithsonian. Each lock of hair is mounted on a black background, locked in place with gold rectangles. The display was so popular that it was even written about in Harper’s Bazaar in a story titled “Washington Gossip.”
As noted by the institution, keeping locks of hair as keepsakes — as creepy as it sounds nowadays — was a common practice in the 1800s. “Cut hair does not decay or lose its color, so it was commonly exchanged in art and jewelry as a steadfast memory of a lost loved one” Smithsonian writer Cassandra Good notes. Varden, apparently, wasn’t even the first person recorded in history to keep locks of presidential hair. In the 1940s, a lawyer named Peter Arvell Browne kept strands of hair from notable men, like the presidents and signers of the Declaration of Independence.
“While some of the locks of hair are in attractive loops or thick bundles, it appears Varden had trouble getting decent samples for many of the presidents,” Good writes. Apparently some of the presidents weren’t keen to part with their hair — possibly because some of them were not endowed with much of it in the first place. That’s at least one thing our Founding Fathers have in common with the candidates today. After all, Americans haven’t voted a bald president into office since the advent of television.
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