Anyone familiar with Chicago bossman George Pullman knows that he was so concerned his grave would be defiled that he went to extreme measures to reinforce it with lead and concrete so that no one would be able to steal his body after it had been laid to rest at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
I heard a fellow speak on the Pullman neighborhood not too long ago – the company town that Pullman built to support his business and that erupted into a historic strike when his self-serving policies at last got to be too much for the folks in his employ -- and when the lecturer mentioned this well traveled trivia I asked him: Was there a good reason for Pullman to feel this way? Was there a precedent at the tail end of the 1800s in Chicago for people to dig up the graves of folks they despised? (And I was thinking: Or was Pullman, like so many men with extreme power and wealth who believe the world revolves around them, just nuts?)
Sure, the lecturer answered: Lincoln’s body had been stolen not too long before that.
HUH?
Turns out it was actually only almost stolen.
Of course, Pullman outfitted the Pullman Car that carried Lincoln across the country on his whistle-stop corpse tour after the assassination (I mean no disrespect –- I have a huge crush on Lincoln -– but according to Sarah Vowell in Assassination Vacation the tour turned out to be a highly successful endorsement for the nascent embalming industry -- they were at it for a really long time), so I’m going to do some more digging. Could be that something unseemly (and entirely intriguing) happened along the way.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
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3 comments:
cool. I wanna hear what happened.
This is kind of curious: “For various reasons, Mr. Lincoln's remains had been moved 17 times since his original burial.” According to this source, in 1900 his son Robert took a page from Pullman’s playbook and had Lincoln entombed in cement.
http://members.aol.com/RVSNorton/Lincoln13.html
AOL member RVSNorton1 is a great source of info for this Lincoln stuff -- he's posted a one-pager on the funeral route for the curious.
Nothing unusual seems to have occurred en route. Sorry folks. Although the disinterment of his little boy Willie so that he could ride along with his daddy is a little creepy.
There's a mention here of the funeral car passing through Union Square in NY where a young Teddy Roosevelt watched it go by from the window of his grandfather's home. This conflicts with info I recently picked up on a trip to NYC with litwit where we visited Teddy's boyhood home (yeah: I'm a history geek. so sue me.) The fellow there said his grand-daddy's home was actually on Time's Square -- where the Virgin Megastore stands today.
But I don't know a whole lot about NY geographical history -- maybe one evolved into the other?
And a note about the embalming: I may have spoken too soon. By the time Lincoln made it to Chicago it may have been giving out. (See Tues, May 2 of RVSNorton1's write up)
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