GREENFIELD — Being a bit of a history buff, Charlie Vetters couldn’t pass up the opportunity to commemorate the anniversary of the day President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train passed through Greenfield just a few yards from where Vetter’s screenprinting shop now stands.
At 5:55 a.m. April 30 — the same time and date the train slowed to a roll through Greenfield in 1865 — Vetters played a recording of Lincoln’s second inaugural speech.
It was the same speech James Whitcomb Riley’s father read to the thousands gathered around the Greenfield train depot to pay their respects as Lincoln’s casket came through town.
“It was a rainy, drizzly day just like this,” Vetters said early Tuesday morning from his Organic Robot shop overlooking Depot Street Park, where train tracks are embedded in the sidewalk where the Pennsylvania Railroad once ran.
Vetters said Lincoln’s words from his second inaugural address are as powerful today as they were when Lincoln gave the speech March 4, 1965, as the Civil War was coming to a close, six weeks before he would be assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
James Whitcomb Riley’s father, Reuben, read excerpts from Lincoln’s inaugural address to the crowd of mourners as the president’s funeral train approached town.
“At the end, he collapsed in his chair and cried,” said local historian Brigette Cook Jones, who did a Facebook Live interview on the funeral procession with Vetters last week.
Jones said the elder Riley — a prominent attorney and local delegate to the Republican National Convention — was likely acquaintances with Lincoln.
He was among the thousands who gathered along what is now the Pennsy Trail to bid farewell to the president who had not only won the presidential election, but is credited with abolishing slavery and ending the Civil War.
After his assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth, plans got underway to bring the country together to mourn.
A funeral train procession was planned spanning 1,654 miles and 400 cities and towns, taking a winding route from Washington, D.C. to Lincoln’s final resting place in Springfield, Ill.
“They wanted to give the nation an opportunity for a public forum for them to be able to mourn — the thought process being that they would take the funeral train to visit major cities,” said Jones.
Thousands of people gathered in each city and all along the train’s route, with those gathered throughout the night lighting bonfires and torches to let the mourners on the train know they were there.
Lincoln’s widow Mary Todd Lincoln and eldest son Robert rode in the passenger car. The body of Lincoln’s son, Willie, who had died from typhoid fever at the age of 11 in 1862 — was exhumed so that he could make the journey alongside his father to Springfield, where they were both buried.
Lincoln was born in Kentucky but he spent his formative years living in southern Indiana, from ages 7-21.
Jones said historians have noted that scores of mourners from miles around came to Greenfield to say goodbye to him at his funeral procession, a 12-day journey which retraced much of the route he took on his inaugural train trip four years before.
A team of morticians rode along to keep his body embalmed and suitable for viewing at stops in major cities across the country, said Jones.
At the stop before Greenfield in Charlottesville, a number of residents from a free black settlement in Rush County came to honor the late president, said Jones.
A train carrying Indiana dignitaries followed the funeral train on the route throughout Indiana from Richmond to Michigan City. The procession made a stop at the former Indiana State Capitol building, where Lincoln’s body lay in state as a reported 15,000 troops and 60,000 private citizens passed by to pay their respects.
Vetters said the Greenfield train depot back then was closer to where the brick-lined Depot Street is now, on the opposite side of Depot Park from his shop.
The depot was “overwhelmed with a mass of mourners,” said Jones, reading from historic reports from the time.
“The Greenfield depot porch was filled to overflowing with women in long dresses, soldiers in their Union uniforms and a sea of men dressed entirely in black … They said you could have heard a pin drop except for the train’s noise,” she said.
“There was the weeping of the women, the soldiers saluting and the men doffing their hats as the train passed by in hushed silence.”
Reuben Riley, who had been wounded in battle serving as a captain in the Civil War, had returned home just four months before Lincoln’s assassination.
As the local delegate, he was asked to read excerpts from Lincoln’s second inaugural address at the Greenfield stop on the funeral procession, which was intended to be a message of healing in a country on the cusp of coming back together after the Civil War.
As Riley spoke, the funeral train rolled into town and slowed to a crawl, said Jones, as the train engineer removed his cap as a show of respect to the mourners gathered there. As the train rolled out of town heading west to the Cumberland depot, a chorus of church bells rang out in downtown Greenfield.
“This is history right where we live, so it’s kind of awesome,” said Vetters, playing bits of Lincoln’s address on the Pennsy Trail just before 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, just as the chimes rang out from the nearby courthouse tower.
