Good morning. Today we’ll look at the flag that covered Abraham Lincoln’s coffin on the funeral train in 1865. It is on the auction block in New York. We’ll also get details on a major housing plan that is now headed for a vote by the full City Council.
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Rhonda Hiser found it by accident: a flag with a past.
It was in a museum in Florida — the Museum of Southern History, perhaps an odd place for a flag associated with Abraham Lincoln, whose presidency is defined by a war that the South lost.
But there the flag was, on a shelf in a corridor. It was folded in a deep-framed display box that was so filthy that she had to clean the glass to get a good look at what was inside: the flag that had covered Lincoln’s coffin on the funeral train after his assassination in April 1865.
On its way from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln was buried, the train rolled through more than 400 cities and towns. At major stops, the coffin was taken off the train. In New York, a horse-drawn carriage carried it along cobblestone streets to City Hall.
The flag is going on the auction block today, with the money from the sale going to the museum, which had to vacate its rented building last month. “It broke our hearts to have to do this,” said Hiser, the museum’s volunteer president and curator. Part of the building had once been a service station, she said, and old fuel tanks underground had leaked. She said that Superfund money had gone into the cleanup, but contamination remained.
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