Lincoln’s hearse a labor of love 

A replica of the horse-drawn hearse that carried Abraham Lincoln’s body to Oak Ridge Cemetery in 1865 is built from more than wood and metal and ostrich plume feathers reaching more than a dozen feet into the air.

There is also pride. Determination.

Sacrifice. A sense from its builders of being part of something that is much larger than themselves. And a bit of body putty.

P.J. Staab, president of Staab Funeral Homes who coordinated the project, recalls that it began in 2013, when he got a call from Katie Spindell, chairwoman of the 2015 Lincoln Funeral Coalition. Could you re-create Lincoln’s hearse?

“I said ‘sure,’ not really knowing what it would involve,” Staab told an audience at a recent program at the Old State Capitol in which he described the construction process.

The first problem was figuring out what the hearse looked like. It had been destroyed by fire in 1887. There was just one surviving photograph, a woodcut illustration and a few newspaper articles.

You didn’t need a picture to know that the hearse was a big deal.

“In the funeral procession, no object attracted more deserved attention than the magnificently decorated hearse, drawn by six splendid black horses,” wrote the Daily Illinois State Register on May 5, 1865, one day after Lincoln was laid to rest.

Constructed in the 1850s for $6,000 (which works out to well into the six figures in today’s dollars), the hearse had been shipped via railroad to Springfield from St. Louis, where it was used at funerals for dignitaries, including a senator and governor. According to the bill of lading from the railroad, the hearse’s rear wheels were oversized, measuring 56 inches in diameter, says Eric Hollenbeck, owner of Blue Ox Millworks in Eureka, California, which built the car portion of the hearse. All of the measurements to ensure accuracy were calculated based on the wheel diameter.

“We knew the size of the wheel, and we proportioned everything,” says John Shafer, a Springfield architect whom Staab enlisted to draw up blueprints. Like Hollenbeck and others who helped create the hearse, Shafer worked for free.

Early on, Staab called Jack Feather of Tombstone, Arizona. Feather specializes in building Victorian-themed hearses drawn by motorcycles converted to trikes and had built one for Staab. Could he replicate the Lincoln hearse?

“I said, ‘Yeah, I can do that,’” Feather recalls. “He said ‘There’s no money involved.’ I said ‘Huh?’ ” The project proved tempting enough that Feather couldn’t resist. He called Hollenbeck, whose Northern California shop produces custom millwork for Victorian homes, in the spring of 2014. Hollenbeck had long wanted to establish a school to teach woodworking skills to veterans, but he hadn’t been able to get the local junior college interested.

“I thought this might be sexy enough to get this veterans’ school started,” Hollenbeck recalls. He was right. Within days, the college sent veterans to Hollenbeck’s shop and work began.

Before it was over, a dozen veterans, who were paid for their work by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, put the car together with antique tools, using Douglas fir, maple and redwood for the wooden portions. They cast aluminum fittings from automotive pistons salvaged from a junkyard. After work was underway, Custom Wagons in Nicholasville, Kentucky, which makes wagon wheels by hand, started building the wheels and chassis. Jay Jones, the company’s owner, is a Vietnam veteran. So, too, are Feather and Hollenbeck.

“It didn’t start out to be a veterans’ project, but that’s the way God intended it to end up,” Staab says.

While the wheels and chassis were under construction more than 2,500 miles away from where the car was being built, Feather fretted in his Arizona shop. He had expected the car to arrive around Thanksgiving. Finally, in February, everything was ready, and Hollenbeck trucked the car down to Tombstone on a flatbed trailer, wrapped in plastic.

Building the car before the chassis was complete was a backward way to approach the project, Hollenbeck says, but the builders had no choice. The 150 th anniversary of Lincoln’s funeral was fast approaching, and they had to start work.

“How do you build a house and then put a foundation under it?” Hollenbeck says. “That’s what we had to do.”

Once the funeral car was in Arizona, the wooden parts shrank due to the difference in humidity between Tombstone, where the air is dry, and Eureka, which is next to the Pacific Ocean. Feather had to disassemble the completed car, then glue and nail it back together again, and even then, there were gaps between the parts. And so Feather used Bondo, a body putty used by automotive shops, to fill in cracks.

Just how the inside of the original hearse looked is anyone’s guess, but Feather’s upholstery specialist went firstclass, using leather, antique tacks and ornate upholstery patterns. Feather put everything on hold to finish the project, delaying delivery of motorcycle-drawn hearses, his specialty, to paying customers while he worked for free.

“This is part of history,” Feather says.

“You have to look at the big picture. It’s not the hearse, it’s what built the hearse.”

Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.