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Bob Berg / Lake Superior Magazine
Lincoln Funeral Car
A replica of the Lincoln funeral car is available through September at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth.
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Lake Superior Railroad Museum
Lincoln Funeral Car
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Lake Superior Railroad Museum
Lincoln Funeral Car
The original funeral car.
After President Abraham Lincoln was murdered in April 1865, a funeral train carried his coffin 1,662 miles from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois, for burial.
Bob Berg / Lake Superior Magazine
Lincoln Funeral Car
An interior view.
This summer, a full-size replica of the Lincoln funeral car is on display at Lake Superior Railroad Museum in the St. Louis County Heritage & Arts Center, the Depot. With the price of Depot admission, you can walk through the replica and learn about the original car’s connection to Minnesota.
The journey home for the 16th president – and his son, Willie, who died in 1862 – lasted two weeks, with the train stopping in major cities for public viewings. “Perhaps a million Americans filed past the open coffin to glimpse their fallen leader’s face,” according to Adam Goodheart in National Geographic. “Millions more watched the procession pass.”
Decades later, the funeral car wound up in Minneapolis with streetcar magnate Thomas Lowry. A couple of years after he passed, a grass fire destroyed the historic rail car in 1911. The replica, built by Dave Kloke of Elgin, Illinois, was featured in events in 2015 marking 150 years since Lincoln’s assassination and the remarkable funeral train.
Other Civil War-related Duluth events and exhibits include: a display and banquet, August 2, honoring Albert Woolson, the last surviving Union soldier, who died in Duluth in 1956 at age 109; a display about Civil War medicine; and history talks from experts, including one on Minnesota during that war.