Through the research and eloquence of Knightstown author Robert Reed, about 70 people boarded a train at the New Castle-Henry County Public Library Saturday, April 13 — the funeral train that carried Lincoln’s body from Washington, D.C. to its final resting place in Springfield, Ill.
In a presentation organized by the Henry County Historical Society with help from Historic Knightstown Inc. and local library officials, Reed discussed his upcoming book about the train that carried the nation’s slain 16th president from Washington, D.C. to its final resting place in Springfield, Ill.
“I didn’t really write the book,” Reed said. “All I did was gather voices together who wrote it for me.”
His book is anticipated to be released in April of 2014.
For approximately 90 minutes, Reed made everyone feel like they were there.
In their minds, they could feel the cold rain that fell along the tracks in Henry County as the train made its way through places like Dublin, Lewisville, Dunreith and Knightstown around 4 to 5 a.m. They could see the decorative arch built over the tracks in Charlottesville and the bon fires that glowed from place to place. They could hear the sound of people singing hymns or chanting prayers, which, as Reed said “would fade from one community only to almost immediately rise from another.”
Reed said those who wrote about the train at the time said people didn’t come out by the thousands to see it but by “the acres.”
It was a 1,700-mile journey that Reed said remarkably encountered few if any difficulties, given the continuing Civil War tensions still present at the time.
“Imagine today what would be involved,” Reed said, “Homeland Security, Secret Service, the FBI.”
Reed said the train tried to duplicate the path that Lincoln took on his way from Springfield to Washington, D.C. when he was first elected president “as much as possible.”
They eliminated Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, however, for fear of potential trouble from the Copperheads, a vocal group of Democrats located in the northern parts of the country who opposed the Civil War.
But Reed said the train did go through Maryland – the home state of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
“There were concerns of possible trouble there, but it turned out to be very calm,” Reed said. “Hundreds of people lined the track there that day.”
A heavy rain forced the train to stop in Indianapolis, where Reed said Lincoln’s body was taken to the Statehouse. “Lines to see it extended four or five miles long by some accounts,” Reed said.
Before the train left Washington, D.C., Reed said some people stood in line 24 hours to pay final respects to the president.
Reed described the 300-passenger train as the 19th-century version of Air Force One. Only one woman was invited to ride – Mary Todd Lincoln. She refused, but had one specific request: the corpse of 12-year-old Willie Lincoln, who had died during his father’s first term of office, be exhumed and ride alongside his father’s body.
Two full-time embalmers also were on board to take care of Lincoln’s body, which Reed said was “partially mummified by the time in reached Springfield.”
Reed told the crowd he wondered if the great Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley – who would have been 15 years old at the time – was among those lined at the tracks in Greenfield, a short distance from his boyhood home.
When you ask a Google search engine how many books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, one source estimates as many as 16,000.
But there’s probably never been one written about Lincoln like this one.
(Darrel Radford is executive director of The Henry County Historical Society and a staff writer at The Courier-Times. Follow him on Twitter @DKRadford. More info on the historical society is available on the museum’s web site, www.henrycountyhs.org.)