(The following article, prepared by the Wisconsin Historical Society, appeared at Madison.com on February 8, 2011.)
One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln left Springfield, Ill., train for nearly two weeks, stopping more than 60 times to speak to throngs of well-wishers.
At Cleveland, his special coach was hooked up to a locomotive called the Reindeer, on which 18-year-old Frank Pond fed the firebox. Pond remembered Lincoln’s coattails flapping in the winter wind whenever the train halted to greet the crowd at one of its dozen stops along Lake Erie.
He also recalled that the triumphal inaugural tour was diverted when pro-slavery activists threatened to kill Lincoln as the train passed through Baltimore. Pond described how the President-elect changed trains at the last moment to slip through the city unharmed.
After the nation had endured four years of horror, Lincoln was assassinated in Washington. On April 21, 1865, his body began a two-week journey home to Springfield, passing through 180 communities filled with mourners instead of revelers.
Pond, promoted to locomotive engineer, piloted the train part way along the New York Central line. He took over the throttle at Erie, Pa., and conducted the funeral cortege along the same lakeshore route he had navigated in triumph just a few years earlier. He delivered the hearse to Cleveland, where thousands passed by the President’s coffin as it lay in state.
After working 60 years on the Cleveland to Erie run of the N.Y. Central, Pond settled in Wausau and worked in the Mosinee mills until he was 85 years old.