IHB: The Lincoln Funeral Train

The president was shot at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. His death occurred the next day. On April 21, 1865, the Lincoln funeral train left Washington, D.C., on a historic trek of almost 1,700 miles across the country before arriving in Springfield, where he was buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery. The train traveled through 160 communities.

There were 12 major cities that held funerals for the 16th president. Many communities along the way held memorials in his honor. More than 3 million people observed the train on its journey to Springfield and then to the cemetery. The city of Joliet was a stop on that 12-day procession.

The train arrived in Joliet just before midnight on May 2, 1895. According to the timetable of the Chicago and Alton Co., it was due in Joliet from Chicago at 11:15 p.m. Several thousand people (one estimate was 12,000) met the train to pay their last respects to the assassinated Lincoln.

The train depot at that time was located across the street from today’s Silver Cross Field. This was prior to the present day elevated train tracks. Two Joliet newspapers, the Joliet Republican and the Joliet Signal, reported the somber crowd listened to “solemn anthems sang by a choir and mournful dirges played by the Joliet Cornet Band.”

The funeral car used to transport Lincoln’s body was originally designed as a private car for the president’s travel use. It has been likened to the equivalent of today’s Air Force One. The railroad car had been completed two years before his death but he had never used it or seen it. Ironically, according to one report, he was scheduled to inspect it on April 15, the day after his death.

Thanks to Jack Tegel from the Joliet Public Library for much of the information about the funeral train’s stop in Joliet. He manages a wealth of information about Joliet’s history maintained at the library.

One tidbit of information I ran across while at the library was a study done for the city from the 1920s. It projected population growth for Joliet by 1950 of 160,000 people. It’s been 65 years since 1950 and we’re not there yet.

More than 10,000 people watched the engine and its nine cars — including the presidential car that was hastily remade into a hearse — begin its 1,654-mile journey. The casket was accompanied by a group of Lincoln relatives and personal friends, as well as a military honor guard made up of luminaries from each branch of the armed forces. The train also contained the body of Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, an 1862 victim of typhoid fever, whose body was disinterred in order join his father in Springfield.