Be Part of History Re-Created

Tomorrow, Saturday, March 7, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Hudson Opera House, auditions will be held for singers to make up the "band of young women" to take part in the re-creation of what transpired on the night of April 25, 1865, when Lincoln's funeral train stopped briefly in Hudson. 

This historic photograph was taken not in Hudson but in Chicago, where the train made its last stop before reaching its destination in Springfield. The photograph shows the procession accompanying the catafalque bearing the coffin of Abraham Lincoln from the train depot to the court house, where Lincoln's body lay in state for twenty-eight hours. The event in Hudson may not have been quite so grand, but historic pictures like this and the description of the scene in Hudson from the journal of Assistant Adjutant General Edward Townsend, the commander of the funeral train, are inspiring and informing the re-creation that will take place here on April 25, 2015, at the very hour the funeral train stopped in Hudson 150 years ago.

Mary Deyerle Hack, of Diamond Opera Theater, will be conducting the auditions and directing the choir of young women. A music historian as well as a professional singer, Hack has already researched and selected the dirges to be sung--dirges that could well be the very ones that were sung in 1865. 

All who are interested in being part of this historic re-creation are urged to come to the Hudson Opera House between 2 and 4 tomorrow afternoon. Thirty-five young women (young in fact or in spirit) are needed to make up the band--the number representing the states in the Union in 1865.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK