150 Years Ago: April 25

A hundred and fifty years ago today in New York City, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, Lincoln's coffin was placed on a fourteen-foot long funeral car drawn by sixteen horses wearing long blankets. The funeral procession, from City Hall to the Hudson River Railway Depot went up Broadway to Fourteenth Street, over to Fifth Avenue, then up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-Fourth Street, and across to Ninth Avenue and the railroad depot.

Seventy-five thousand people marched in the in the enormous procession, and many thousands more packed the streets to witness the funeral procession. It is said that spaces at windows along the route rented for $100 a person.

In the 1950s, Stefan Lorant came across the photograph above while researching a book about Lincoln. It shows the procession as it approached Union Square. The house at the corner is the home of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's grandfather. Examining the photograph more closely, Lorant noticed two boys watching from a second-story window of the Roosevelt mansion. Those two boys, it turns out, are the future president Theodore Roosevelt, then six and a half years old, and his brother Elliot.

New York Times

After the grand procession, the coffin was returned to the funeral train for the journey to Albany and its stop along the way in Hudson. The train left New York shortly after 4 p.m. Passing through the Hudson Valley, on the Hudson River Railway, the funeral train was pulled by a locomotive named Union and accompanied by a pilot engine called Constitution.
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