Abraham Lincoln was a good half-foot longer than the bed at William and Anna Petersen's boarding house, where he was carried just after John Wilkes Booth shot him in the head at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, one day shy of 140 years ago.

Those tending to the dying president had to place him across the bed diagonally.

Tuesday afternoon, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum workers were reassembling the bed, which will be among the centerpieces of a six-month temporary exhibit taking an in-depth look at Lincoln's assassination. The exhibit, called Blood on the Moon, will start Tuesday, when the museum is dedicated, and run until Oct. 16.

Booth himself had rested on the bed about a month before he shot Lincoln, said Richard Norton Smith, director of the Lincoln museum. Booth had been visiting a friend boarding at the Petersens when he decided to stretch out on it.

For the past 85 years, the bed has never left the Chicago Historical Society, which purchased it as part of a vast collection owned by candy manufacturer Charles Gunther. He bought it from William Boyd, who got the bed at an auction at which the Petersens' furniture was sold off after they died in 1871. Boyd paid $80 for the bed and other furnishings.

A few other items from the boarding-house room also are on loan to the museum, including a candlestick holder, a bureau dresser and an illustration of a village blacksmith that hung on the wall.

Smith approached the Chicago Historical Society's director, Lonnie Bunch, about borrowing the bed. The timing was good. The society had closed its Lincoln exhibit as part of a makeover project.

Items on loan from other institutions also will be part of the 3,000-square-foot temporary exhibit, which follows Booth and Lincoln hour by hour that fateful day.

Other items in the exhibit include:

The horse carriage Abraham and Mary rode in to the theater, which is on loan from the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Ind.

Love letters written by Booth, photos of the actor and locks of his hair, pieces of Lincoln's jacket and blood-stained shirt and gloves, and a Lincoln effigy doll, from Louise Taper of California, one of the largest private collectors of Lincolnania.

A canvas hood and iron manacles worn by Booth's co-conspirators on loan from the Quincy and Adams County Historical Society.

Life sketches of the conspirators by General Lew Wallace (future author of Ben Hur) from the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis.

The bed and other items in the Petersen room will be arranged to "re-create the same last moments" of Lincoln's life, said Kim Bauer, curator of the Lincoln collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, which is across the street from the museum.

Pete Sherman can be contacted at 788-1539 or pete.sherman@sj-r.com.