The 150 year mystery of the exterior color of President Lincoln's funeral train car... Solved!

After being shot on April 14 at Ford’s Theatre by the actor and rabid Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, he was transported to a boarding house across the street from the theater, where he died early the next morning. His body lay in state at the White House and the rotunda of the Capitol building before being loaded into the railroad car, which had been modified to transport Lincoln’s coffin and the coffin of his young son Willie, who had died of typhoid fever in 1862. Willie had been buried in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, but after his father’s assassination his coffin was removed and placed aboard the funeral train. The exterior sides bore a large painted crest of the United States. 

Lincoln's Funeral Train - 150 Year Memorial on May 02, 2015 - Car Medallion.

Lincoln's Funeral Train - 150 Year Memorial on May 02, 2015 - Train Wheel Trucks.

The special car, built to transport a living Lincoln and his cabinet, was one of the most elaborately appointed railroad vehicles ever made. The U.S. Military Railroads built the car and delivered it to the president in early 1865. It had upholstered walls, etched-glass windows, 16 wheels (adaptable to both standard and five-foot-gauge tracks) to ensure a smooth ride, and rooms for working and relaxation.

Some of the major stops on route from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois.
[CLICK MAP FOR FULL SIZE]

Interestingly, Lincoln’s funeral car was originally intended to be the official presidential railroad car—the equivalent of Air Force One today. The U.S. Military Railroads built the car and delivered it to the president in early 1865. Tragically, Lincoln never rode in it until his death.

President Abraham Lincoln's funeral car in Alexandria, Virginia.

President Lincoln's funeral train in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

By military order, Lincoln’s funeral procession consisted of no fewer than nine cars, including the funeral car, officers’ car, six passenger cars and one baggage car. The procession left Washington on April 21, 1865, and proceeded across the Northern states, stopping for formal funeral ceremonies in 12 major cities. Smaller communities organized numerous other memorial services along the train’s route. According to a contemporary newspaper report, during the 12-day journey, there were no accidents—an unusual distinction for such a long journey in a time when trains lacked many of today’s safety features.

President Abraham Lincoln's funeral car in Chicago, Illinois, which arrived in Chicago on May 3, 1865, then continued on to Illinois' state capitol.

After being passed between the military and a couple railroad companies, Twin City Rapid Transit Company President Thomas Lowry bought it in 1905. Lowry's intention was to fully rehabilitate the car and find a place to display it so that people could finally visit this car and see it in all of its former splendor. Lowry died before he could restore the car and it was passed to the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs which kept it in Columbia Heights near the intersection of 37th Ave NE and Jackson St.

In 1911, the Federation planned to move it for exhibit. Months before the move, a grass fire erupted on March 18, 1911 and engulfed the car.

Lincoln's Funeral Car after the 1911 Fire.

Though many details are known about the car, its color was believed to be lost to history. As no color photographs, lithographs or contemporary paintings of the car exist.

Some accounts (written long after the Civil War) described it as “chocolate brown,” others as closer to a claret, or red-wine color. As Wesolowski points out, chocolate bars didn’t exist at the time of the procession, so chocolate brown at the time would have referred more to Dutch chocolate, which was more reddish brown in color than the chocolate we think of today. It was said that historians were able to salvage only a metal coupling from the ashes, but a man from Minnesota was located who had inherited part of the original railcar’s window frame, perhaps one of the only pieces that survived the 1911 fire. 

Researchers analyzed a small piece of the window trim under high-powered microscopes, then scraped away microscopic flecks of paint and compared them with pigment records and national color standards of the time. Through this painstaking process, they managed to identify the color as a brownish-red; describes as “dark maroon.”

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The “Peoria War” of 1813 was a big part of the elimination of Indians in Illinois.

A nearly forgotten series of small skirmishes that became known as the “Peoria War” made up a big part of the elimination of Indians in Illinois. The tribe of the Peoria was not involved in this conflict.

In October 1812, Illinois’ territorial Gov. Ninian Edwards launched attacks against Kickapoo and Potawatomi villages in and around the wide area of the Illinois River dubbed Lake Pimiteoui. Some said the assaults — with companies of soldiers and irregulars (militia) destroying the homes and killing dozens of inhabitants — were in retaliation for the Potawatomi victory at Chicago's Fort Dearborn (An in-depth account of the Fort Dearborn Massacre).

Returning to the Peoria area, Black Partridge changed his conciliatory relations with the U.S. military. In his absence, the Americans’ attacks resulted in the destruction of the Potawatomi leader’s home and the deaths of his daughter and grandchild. That caused Black Partridge to renounce his allegiance and take up arms with other resisting Indian forces.

It’s impossible to say what would have happened had the assault on Peoria-area villages not occurred, of course. However, if Black Partridge and other Indian forces had had more resources from the British, with whom they’d been allied since the United States declared war against Great Britain on June 18, 1812, settlers’ westward expansion might have been stopped at the Illinois-Indiana border.

Instead, treachery in treaties and policies, clumsy betrayals, and shifting alliances linked the Peoria War to Tecumseh’s War and the War of 1812 and led to the eradication of Indian villages and their ultimate displacement.

Ties to the Tecumseh War and the War of 1812 started in 1811 and extended to the Treaty of Ghent, where American and British diplomats on Christmas Eve 1814 settled disputes — and abandoned Indians to the changing whims of settlers, troops, and governments.

Tecumseh’s War was a war of resistance against “the children of the Evil Spirit” after the Shawnee chief assembled a coalition of different tribes following the Treaty of Fort Wayne. That pact was supposedly decided on September 29, 1809, when Indian leaders agreed to relinquish 3 million acres in Indiana and Illinois, and although Black Partridge signed, many Indian leaders refused and some declared it a fraud, sparking the Tecumseh War. That armed conflict continued until Tecumseh’s death at the Battle of the Thames in southern Canada on October 5, 1813.

Meanwhile, the War of 1812 had four causes, historians agree upon Britain seizing Americans to forcibly serve on British ships, British trade restrictions, occasional British support for Indians, and a desire by some U.S. leaders to seize Canada from British control.

The Indian population in Illinois had increased after 1811 when Tecumseh’s forces were defeated at a battle at Tippecanoe in Indiana, but there were few U.S. troops or garrisons.

Still, a month after Black Partridge’s home and family were wiped out, another punitive attack came from troops coming to the Peoria area from Fort Knox in Kentucky. Despite the Indian villages having many “neutral” Potawatomi and Kickapoo warriors setting wild grass ablaze to stop the soldiers, troops destroyed villages and killed inhabitants who’d fled into a swamp. Even indecisive Indian villages then rallied against the troops and settlers to fight with the British and Tecumseh’s ragtag confederacy of tribes.

Fort Clark Illustration

About a year later, Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames east of Detroit in southern Ontario, and a few weeks later, fewer than 200 Potawatomi and Kickapoo warriors led by Black Partridge were beaten back by more than 1,000 soldiers who’d arrived from St. Louis to bolster forces at the newly built Fort Clark (constructed in 1813) on the riverfront near where Liberty Street is now, named for Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark. That winter, Black Partridge met in St. Louis with Missouri’s Territorial Gov. William Clark (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and brother of George Rogers Clark), ending the Peoria War.

Black Partridge died in 1815, but he was one of several area Indian leaders, men who answered to the names Gomo, Senachwine, Shabbona, Main Poc of the Kankakee, and Black Hawk of the Sauk ("Life of Black Hawk" as dictated by himself). Some had supported the French against Great Britain and colonists in the French and Indian War; some backed colonists in the American Revolution.

Elsewhere, remaining Indian fighters including Kickapoo, Sauk, and Fox defeated troops in two related actions in the area where the Quad Cities are today: the Battle of Rock Island (July 1814) and the Battle of Credit Island (September 1814). But such victories were few.

Edwards, who served from 1809-1818, went on to again order attacks against Indians during the Winnebago War in southern Wisconsin in the 1820s when the U.S. government started setting aside “reservation” land farther west. Also, 5 million acres of land in western Illinois in May 1812 was offered to people who were serving in the War of 1812 — about one-eighth of the current state’s area, and where many Indians still lived. So new settlers and land speculators stepped up efforts to push Indians from the Midwest to Oklahoma, where the Potawatomi Nation survives.

Later, the Black Hawk War, lasting four months in 1832, was the Indians’ last, unsuccessful attempt to preserve their homes in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Pokagon of the Potawatomi in the late 1800s said, “Often in the stillness of the night, when all nature seems asleep about me, there comes a gentle rapping at the door of my heart. I open it; a voice inquires, ‘Pokagon, what of your people? What will their future be?’ My answer is: ‘Mortal man has not the power to draw aside the veil of unborn time. That gift belongs to the Divine. But it is given to him to closely judge the future by the present and the past.’”

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.