The Indiana county where Abraham Lincoln grew up will mark the 144th anniversary of his assassination by displaying a replica of Lincoln’s coffin in its courthouse.
The ornate coffin will be displayed at the Spencer County Courthouse on Tuesday, 144 years after Lincoln was mortally wounded at Ford’s Theater. He died the morning after the shooting.
Guards in period uniforms keep watch over the coffin as it lays in state in the courthouse.
Melissa Miller of the Spencer County Visitors Bureau said she also expects some “mourners” in 19th century clothing to show up when the coffin of the Civil War president goes on display.
“There are a lot of people who just love any excuse to put on their pioneer costumes,” Miller told the Evansville Courier & Press.
The coffin display begins at noon with a wreath laying at the courthouse about 30 miles southeast of Evansville, followed by public viewing of the casket in the rotunda until midnight. A short film, “Faces of Lincoln,” will also be shown.
Miller said the replica coffin currently touring the country was created in Indiana by Batesville Casket Co. and is authentic down to the smallest detail. It’s draped in black cloth, is 6 feet, 6 inches long and is made of solid walnut with sterling silver handles and studs.
Spencer County typically celebrates Lincoln’s boyhood — he lived there from age 7 to 21 — and this year it’s celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. But Tuesday’s funeral tribute mimics the aftermath of Lincoln’s death.
“His boyhood is our Indiana connection, but you can’t deny there’s an insatiable curiosity about how he died,” Miller said.
Until John F. Kennedy’s death in 1963, Lincoln had the distinction of having the world’s largest funeral.
Lincoln’s funeral train carried his body from Washington to Springfield, Ill., creating a traveling spectacle that allowed an estimated one million people to view his open coffin.
Each major stop from April 21 to May 4, 1865, involved large funeral processions. In Indianapolis, state historians say at least 50,000 Hoosiers filed past Lincoln’s coffin, which was placed on display at the predecessor to Indiana’s current Statehouse.
In Indianapolis, streets were lit by bonfires and torches as the coffin was returned to Union Depot at midnight and loaded back onto the funeral train.
That train also carried the coffin of one of Lincoln’s four sons, Willie, who died in 1862. It was disinterred from a Washington, D.C., cemetery and placed on the train to be buried with his father.
Information from: Evansville Courier & Press, http://www.courierpress.com
