ASHLAND, Ohio – A piece of American history rolled into Ashland this week as the city celebrates its long history.
As part of the Ashland Bicentennial celebration, a full-scale replica of the train car that carried President Abraham Lincoln’s body after his assassination in April 1865 was on display Monday and Tuesday at the Ashland County Fairgrounds.
Historic Railroad Equipment Association, spearheaded by Dave Kloke of Elgin, Illinois, built the 48-foot-long replica train car from private donations. The group plans to travel across the country with the train car this summer in honor of the 150th anniversary of the original car’s 12-day, 1,600-mile journey from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois.
Thousands of people visited the train car during its two-day stay in Ashland, including several groups of Ashland elementary students, who got an up-close lesson in American history.
“We think history is very important. I want people to come away with a desire to look deeper into history,” said Dale Moorhouse, who was greeting visitors while dressed in period garb and portraying John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary. “That’s what Dave wants to do. We hope this will be a springboard, where people will leave here and read more for themselves and understand our history. We like to get the kids involved and then they can bring their parents and family out to see it, too.”
Moorhouse told those waiting in line Tuesday evening that the replica was completed just three weeks ago and Ashland was one of the first stops. Moorhouse explained that the train car was reproduced with great attention paid to authenticity, except for the wheels.
“To fabricate the original wheels would have cost $80,000 which we don’t have, so we bought used Pullman wheels from the 1940s,” Moorhouse said. However, there is a tie between Pullman Palace Car Company and Lincoln – Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln served as president of Pullman from 1897 until his death in 1926.
Early in 1865, the U.S. Military Railroad delivered a private railroad car known as “United States” to Lincoln for him to use for personal transportation – a 19th century Air Force One. However, President Lincoln never used the railroad car while he was alive.
Lincoln had an appointment to view the car on the day he died. The president was shot on April 14 and died on April 15.
After his death, the train car was converted to transport his casket.
A Minnesota prairie fire destroyed the original train car while it was in storage in 1911. Kloke, a master mechanic and owner of a construction company, and his team had exterior photos to work with in their project, but no photos of the car’s interior. Instead, they were forced to rely on sketches and descriptions from a book.
Since all the photos of the train were black and white, it was a challenge for the team to match the exterior color exactly. Morehouse said that when the original car was destroyed by the fire, someone salvaged one lone window from the remains and kept the window in storage for decades. Eventually, a chemist analyzed the fragment and was able to determine the exact chemical formula of the paint used on the original car; a formula which Kloke and his team used to recreate the paint to match exactly.
Other touches of authenticity include casket handles made by the original manufacturer and carpet made by Pennsylvania-based Heirloom Weavers, which has done work for the Lincoln home in Springfield.
It took Kloke and his team 10 years to build the engine, known as The Leviathan, and another 4-1/2 years to create the funeral car.
The funeral car contains three rooms: one contains Lincoln’s casket, the middle room was intended to be a bedroom in the car’s original designs, and the third room held the body of Lincoln’s son, Willie. Willie died of Typhoid Fever three years earlier and Lincoln’s wife had his body disinterred so he could be buried in Illinois with his father.
The original Leviathan was built in 1868 by Schenectady Locomotive Works, three years after Lincoln’s assassination, but the locomotive is similar to engines that would have pulled the president’s funeral train. Moorhouse explained that as many as 12 or 14 different engines pulled the funeral car as it made its 1,600-mile journey from the nation’s capital to the president’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois.
“Each time the train went to another railroad, that railroad would furnish an engine to haul the train,” Moorhouse said.
In 1865, Lincoln’s funeral train made several stops in North Central Ohio including Shelby, Crestline and Galion.
The two-day Ashland display was sponsored by Americarb.
The Lincoln funeral train will next be at the Lake Shore Railway Association in Wellington on May 22-25 and May 30-31.
The City of Ashland is celebrating its 200th year anniversary during 2015 and will be hosting many different events as part of the year-long celebration, which is sponsored by Donley Auto Group. For more information on these and other events, please go to the Bicentennial website.
