Earlier this spring, thousands of people from all over the nation gathered in Springfield, IL, to honor the life of our beloved President Abraham Lincoln. After his death in 1865, his body was carried hundreds of miles by a funeral train. It passed through more than a hundred cities, with formal ceremonies in 12 cities, before arriving to Springfield, his final resting place. Millions of people witnessed the procession or viewed his body first hand.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s death. The special events and reenactments that took place in Springfield would not have been complete without the Abraham Lincoln hearse at the center of it all.

The original hearse was tragically destroyed in 1887 by a fire at the Lynch & Arnot stables in St. Louis, MO. All that was left was the photo and two silver plate medallions. But that did not stop the Staab Family Livery in Springfield from gathering historians, craftsmen, and a combat veterans’ build team to reverse engineer and recreate this historic vehicle.

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