This article originally appeared in the pages of the Gettysburg Times, in March of 2025. It was penned by Wendy Allen of the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania, in the hopes of sharing the work the Fellowship does.

This April 15th will mark the 160th anniversary of President Lincoln’s death.

On April 21, 1865, the train carrying the coffin of President Abraham Lincoln departed Washington, D.C. on its way to Springfield, Illinois, where he would be buried on May 4.

According to our friends at the Lincoln Collection in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the railroad coach that carried Lincoln’s body was originally built for a very different purpose. The War Department had ordered it to be specially constructed by the United States Military Railroad in Alexandria, Virginia, as a private railroad car, named The United States, for the use of the president and his cabinet. When the car was completed in early 1865, with its upholstered walls, wood paneling, decorative painted panels, and etched-glass windows, it was one of the most lavishly appointed railroad cars ever built. Its 16 broad-tread wheels were intended to ensure it could travel over nearly all gauge railroads, and its sides were ironclad, with armor-plating between the outer and inner walls. It contained a stateroom, a sitting room, and a sleeping apartment. In the stateroom was a 7-foot 6-inch sofa built to accommodate Lincoln’s 6-foot 4-inch frame. The coach was said to have cost $10,000, more than three times the cost of a standard passenger car. It was indeed a “presidential coach.”

Perhaps thinking The United States too ostentatious, Lincoln never used it.

After Lincoln’s death and burial, the funeral car returned to the Military Car Shops. However, the shop quickly was soon discovered that the storage and protection of the car was too costly. So, in 1866  the shop sold the funeral car to T.C. Durant of the Union Pacific Railroad. He moved the vehicle to Omaha, Nebraska, and used it as his personal car. In the 1870s the car was stripped of its luxurious fittings. 

Then in 1898, the Union Pacific displayed the minimally reconditioned car at the Trans-Mississippi Centennial Exposition in Omaha. Unfortunately, vandals again took their toll after the exposition until showman Frank B. Snow purchased the car from the railroad in 1903. Snow exhibited the dilapidated car in the Lincoln Museum at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

In the fall of 1905, Snow sold the dilapidated car to Thomas Lowry of Minneapolis. Lowry moved the car to Minneapolis and put it on display near his proposed suburban development of Columbia Heights in the hope of attracting potential home buyers. 

After Lowry’s death in 1909, the car came into the possession of the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs, which planned to restore and exhibit it. 

On March 18, 1911, before it could be moved from its storage site in Minneapolis, the Lincoln funeral car was destroyed in a prairie fire. It was reported that souvenir hunters carried off many of the bits of charred wood and twisted metal that remained.