Abraham Lincoln's Funeral Rail-Car Landed in Minnesota in 1911 Before Being Destroyed by Fire.

Abraham Lincoln’s funeral rail-car carried the president’s body 1,600 miles from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill., after he was assassinated in 1865. It ended up decades later in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, where it met its end.

It was just three-quarters of a mile from the clanging bell atop of the Columbia Heights fire hall to the wind-whipped grass fire roaring to its south. But by the time the village’s fledging fire department could respond to the alarm, that seven-block distance proved too great to save a sacred relic of U.S. history.

That grass fire on March 18, 1911, not only consumed 10 blocks of early Columbia Heights, it razed the funeral train car that had carried slain President Abraham Lincoln’s body home from Washington, D.C., to Illinois. More than 7 million people in 180 cities and seven states had solemnly watched the train chug halfway across the country in 1865.

So what was the funeral car doing in Minnesota 46 years later?

First, some background on what historians describe as the Air Force One of its era. The special car christened the “United States,” was built in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1863 and 1864 at the U.S. Military Car Shops during the Civil War.

It was designed with 16 wheels to smooth out the ride for Lincoln and his advisers. Etched-glass windows, fancy upholstered interior walls, and a painted bald eagle national crest adorned the car, which had meeting rooms and parlors for relaxing.

Coach Recreation from the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln's Assassination, in Springfield, Illinois, on April 15, 2015.

One problem. Lincoln never climbed aboard when he was alive. He might have found it too ostentatious, especially in wartime, according to Jack El-Hai, one of Minnesota’s leading history writers who has researched the ill-fated train car.

Newspapers published the funeral train’s scheduled stops in the days leading up to Lincoln’s May 4, 1865, funeral in Springfield, Illinois. Puffing black smoke, the train would stop in town after town along its 1,600-mile route. His coffin would be placed behind an elaborate horse-drawn hearse and brought to public buildings for viewing.

Lincoln didn’t ride alone. The body of his son, Willie, was exhumed from a cemetery in Washington so he could be buried with his father in Springfield. Willie had died of typhoid fever at 11 during his father’s first term.

After the funeral, the government sold Lincoln’s rail-car for $6,850 ($115,960 today) to the Union Pacific Railroad, whose executives used it for several years. They sold it for $2,000 to an entrepreneur named Franklyn Snow, who tried to cash in on the morbid artifact at commercial exhibits across the Midwest. Maybe it was too close to the Civil War because the shows flopped.

The Colorado Central Railroad bought the car for $3,000 and stripped it down for use as a day coach and a work car. After bouncing around for nearly 40 years, the car found its would-be savior in Minnesota.

His name was Thomas Lowry, a Minneapolis land developer, railroad honcho, civic booster, and streetcar magnate. Realizing the value of this neglected piece of history, Lowry purchased the car in 1905. He planned to completely restore and permanently display it somewhere people could witness the old train car’s historic splendor.

Lowry called his treasure “the most sacred relic in the United States.” But he died in 1909 from tuberculosis that had dogged him for the four years he owned the car. Perhaps he hoped his rescue of the Lincoln funeral car might become part of his legacy, right along with his beloved namesake — the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis.

After his death, Lowry’s estate donated the train car to the Minnesota Federation of Women’s Clubs. That group planned to secure it in an exhibit space later that summer of 1911. In the meantime, it was idled and stored in Columbia Heights on 37th Avenue between Quincy and Jackson streets.

Columbia Heights, located just north of Minneapolis, was an unlucky 13 years old when the grass fires swept across Anoka County that mid-March Saturday in 1911. The fire department was just four years old, paying local men a couple of bucks to respond when the bell rang above the original headquarters on 40th Avenue and 7th Street. By the time the fire squad responded, it was too late to save the old funeral rail-car.

“Car That Carried Remains of Lincoln Is Burned in Spectacular Prairie Fire,” screamed the headlines in the Minneapolis Sunday Journal. “Relic of Martyred President Reduced to Blackened Framework of Wood and Iron.”

Historians reported that they could only save a metal coupling from the ashes. Photos after the fire showed the charred shell and framework.

Over the years, pieces of the train car have surfaced. In St Paul, renowned painter and illustrator Edward Brewer moved the old Meeker Dam lock master’s house a half-mile up from the Mississippi River to Pelham Boulevard. The artist’s father had acquired a piece of the metal rail from the Lincoln funeral car, and Brewer used it to suspend a kettle over his fireplace, according to old newspaper clippings.

Illinois history buffs, meanwhile, have constructed a replica of the funeral car that now tours the country in a semitrailer truck, because driving it down rail lines proved too costly.

During that 2013 replica project, organizers didn’t know the precise color to paint the window frames. Witnesses couldn’t agree if it was claret red or chocolate brown.

So they tracked down a Minnesota man who inherited a window frame from a relative who had secured it after the 1911 fire. The man with the window agreed to scrape off a paint sample in exchange for a piece of black bunting that once had been draped on the funeral car. He requested that his name be kept secret. Paint-chip tests showed that the window frames were dark maroon with four parts black to one part red.

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

Here is one more eerie coincidence. The real, one-of-a-kind, Lincoln hearse, which carried the president’s body from the Springfield train station to the Illinois Capitol building and then to the Oak Ridge Cemetery, is long gone. The livery’s owners had lent it out for the funeral procession and kept it for 22 years until it was destroyed in an 1887 fire. Also lost were three men and 200 horses.

Funeral Hearse Recreation from the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln's Assassination, in Springfield, Illinois, on April 15, 2015.

Two silver medallions from Abraham Lincoln's hearse survived and were displayed at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum as part of the exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of his assassination. 

One of two Surviving Silver Medallions from
the Funeral Hearse's Center Side Panels.

The medallions haven't been seen by the public since Lincoln's funeral in 1865 and were separated shortly afterward. Historians thought they'd been destroyed in the 1887 livery fire. But the hearse's owner had removed the medallions. One ended up at the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Missouri, and the other one at the private Harlan Crow Library in Dallas, Texas.

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Lost Communities of Chicago - Mrs. Conley's Patch

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

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The 1850s and 60s saw masses of poor immigrants, primarily from Ireland, building a shantytown of low, tumble-down buildings centered around Monroe and Wells Streets, known as "Mrs. Conley's Patch." Longtime alderman of Chicago's 1st ward and world-renowned John Joseph Coughlin or 'Bathhouse John,' was raised there as a child. However, Conley's Patch was also notorious in its day, not only for its decrepit dwellings but also for some of its residents' depravity and dark crimes. 

There were houses of prostitution, including most famously Madam Lou Harper's "Mansion" at 219 West Monroe Street (today; 228 West Monroe Street) between Wells and Franklin and Francis Warren's streetwalkers troupe resided between Clark and LaSalle.

The principal "King of Vice," among the city's first ─ and perhaps greatest ─ was Roger Plant. A Yorkshire-born Englishman, Plant arrived in the city about 1857. Legend had grown around Plant, who purportedly had been convicted of a felony in England and was scheduled to be exiled to Australia when he escaped and made his way to Chicago.

By 1858, Plant had built "Roger's Barracks," a set of poorly-constructed shacks centered on the northeast corner of 5th Avenue (Wells Street) and Monroe. The Barracks, later known as "Under the Willow" (1858-1868), so named after a single sad willow tree which stood on the corner, was the center for all vice in the city until the end of the Civil War (1861-1865). Plant popularized the catchphrase ─ "Why Not?" ─ which was emblazoned on each of the blue window shades in the complex.

At just over five feet tall and no more than 100 lbs, Plant himself was diminutive, but he was apparently a vicious fighter, skillful with a pistol, knife, and club, but especially with his fists and teeth. The only one who could ever whip him, it is said, was Mrs. Plant, a mountainous woman weighing at least 250 lbs. Plant kept order in the saloon on the premises and operated as a fence and a bail bondsman. While his wife ran a brothel with no fewer than 80 girls, they rented out cubbies on the property for use by streetwalkers and made a trade of "white slave girls."

During the civil war, Under the Willow ("that shadowy haunt of sin," as the Tribune put it) played host to battalions of soldiers and was rarely empty at any hour. However, it was a fearsome place with many men finding themselves robbed, beaten, or knifed, and discarded in the alleys (often by Mrs. Plant herself) after drinking too much or falling asleep in one of the decrepit cribs.

Some of the permanent residents of the Plant complex included Mary Hodges, an apparently fantastically talented shoplifter, who it is said, in tall-tale fashion, would drive a cart into the shopping district several times a week to bring back her takings. Another was Mary Brennan ("an audacious old sinner," says the Tribune), who was herself a thief but also the trainer of thieves and pickpockets. Mrs. Brennan's two daughters were caught breaking into a home whose owner was away on business one afternoon in 1866. As punishment, they were placed in the St. Aloysius Catholic Asylum on Prairie Avenue, separated from their mother until adulthood.

Another long-time tenant was Lib Woods. Miss Woods arrived in Chicago in 1855 and was described in 1860 as "one of the gayest, prettiest, most fascinating creatures that could be found among her class in this city… with a splendid head of hair that made her rivals all despair. It hung down below her waist, in long, glassy ringlets."

Woods was the girlfriend of Billy Meadows, a successful prizefighter. But when Meadows took sick and died in 1861, Miss Woods' declined into drunkenness, and sexual dissipation was quick. She took up residence at Under the Willow as a prostitute shortly after and was then seized with smallpox, disfiguring her beautiful features. She was frequently drunk and became increasingly violent as she aged. She died a sad death in 1870, found in a gutter on 5th Avenue (Wells Street).

Conley's Patch was leveled in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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NOTE: On October 9, 2021, I received an email requesting any additional info on Conley's Patch. In the email was the following statement: "The Chicago Historical Society had little on the subject and provided the link to your article."