LOUISIANA, MO. ? Antiques aficionado George St. Pierre took a small gamble in handing over $10 for a framed scrap of cloth at a secondhand store. Nearly two decades later, he hopes that swatch — supposedly from the coat President Lincoln was slain in — is worth a small fortune.

On April 17, the 67-year-old man from this tiny Mississippi River town will put what he calls “the find of a lifetime, an awesome piece” for sale on GoAntiques.com. The minimum bid: $1 million.

A Lincoln collector thinks St. Pierre must be dreaming, pointing to a crucial item he and other skeptics say is lacking: a thorough documentation of its chain of ownership, from the time it supposedly was snipped from Lincoln’s coat by souvenir scavengers to its purchase by St. Pierre for the price of a large pizza.

No one can definitively say the silk-lined cloth — barely bigger than a postage stamp — was from the silk-lined overcoat the 16th president wore the night he was shot in the head in 1865 by actor-turned-assassin John Wilkes Booth. But St. Pierre believes he’s sufficiently made the connection, and he’s ready to cash in.

A leading Lincoln scholar has said she is “90 to 95 percent” certain the piece is no hoax and really did come from the bloodstained sleeve of the coat Lincoln wore that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre.

But skeptics aren’t convinced.

“How do we know what’s genuine, a fairy tale, a wish or fraudulent?” said memorabilia broker Daniel Weinberg, owner of The Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. “It needs more than someone saying it appears the cloth may be similar to what Lincoln wore.”

The $1 million asking price, he says, is “fanciful.”

“It very well could be what he says it is,” Weinberg said. “But there’s not enough evidence for collectors like me to buy it.”

Divining ‘provenance’

Much of St. Pierre’s authentication is written correspondence from those who have examined it since he bought it in 1987 at a shop in nearby Quincy, Ill., where Lincoln once debated Stephen Douglas.

“Piece Taken From Coat Abe Lincoln Wore The Night He Was Assassinated,” claimed a handwritten note inside the frame that also clutched a chunk of bark said to be from famed American Indian chief Blackhawk’s canoe.

A few months later, one-time Ford’s Theatre museum technician Frank Hebblethwaite told St. Pierre in writing that “it is quite possible that you do have a piece of the overcoat worn by President Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination.”

Hebblethwaite’s suggestion: Proving the authenticity of the cloth would require determining whether it is the same material as Lincoln’s coat — black, closely woven wool — and documenting its ownership over the many decades, evidence-gathering known in antiques circles as “provenance.”

St. Pierre says documenting the cloth’s owners over the past century and a half is impossible, even foolish. But a textile expert who examined St. Pierre’s swatch about a decade ago recalls “it sure looks like it could be the real thing to me.”

“I can’t link it to Lincoln’s era or the coat. All I can say is it’s unusually high-quality fabric,” said Randy Bresee, a University of Tennessee professor specializing in textiles. “I think he’s got something there, at least that’s my hunch. You would have to compare it to the coat to be definitive.”

Therein lies the problem. The coat — on display at Ford’s Theatre since 1968 — has been kept behind glass, with curators refusing access to the garment relic to safeguard the piece, much less pluck some of its fibers for microscopic comparison to St. Pierre’s swatch.

Regardless, Bresee vividly remembers the swatch as presidential.

“Oh boy, it was a real high-quality fabric — one of the best I’ve seen,” said Bresee, whose work with textiles spans three decades. “The black color was very neutral, just a very deep black. The fact they went to a lot of trouble to go to neutral black tells me they had something special in mind for that fabric.”

A unique blend

In about 1994, a then-curator at the Ford’s museum — Marshal Kesler — asked a textile conservator to inspect the St. Pierre’s swatch and compare it with the coat, prominently displayed at the museum and intact except for its missing left sleeve. Kesler has said “it did appear that in all likelihood the piece is part of the coat. I’m 90 to 95 percent sure.”

In July 1996, National Parks Service textile conservator Jane Merritt told St. Pierre in writing that after examining the cloth in its frame, the “color, weave structure and materials all seemed consistent with the Brooks Brothers coat” Lincoln wore.

St. Pierre’s piece, like the rest of the coat, is a unique blend of three layers of material — black silk on top, with a fibrous material in the middle and a cotton backing, all quilted together.

The Brooks Brothers company custom-made the overcoat for Lincoln as a gift for his second inaugural, Kesler has said. Soon after her husband’s death, Mrs. Lincoln gave the coat to Lincoln doorkeeper and friend Alphonse Donn, who proudly showed the coat to visiting friends, leading to the lost sleeve.

“He would bring it out to show people, and apparently if he ever turned his back, they would take a piece out of it,” Kesler said. “Back then it was just that people wanted to have some sort of relic of the great man.”