Why Lincoln's Coffin Was Opened 36 Years After His Death

On September 26, 1901, thirty-six years after Abraham Lincoln was buried, twenty-three people stood inside his tomb in Springfield, Illinois, while two plumbers cut a hole in his lead-lined coffin, right above his face. His only surviving son, Robert, had asked for the coffin to stay closed. The men in the tomb opened it anyway. The youngest witness was a thirteen year old boy named Fleetwood Lindley. His father had sent for him at school, and he rode out to the cemetery on his bicycle. This file follows Lincoln's body from the morning he died in the Petersen House to the day it was sealed under two tons of cement. It covers the embalmer who promised his body would never decay, a funeral train that ran for thirteen days, a gang of counterfeiters who tried to steal the President on election night in 1876, and the years his coffin was hidden under a pile of lumber while visitors paid their respects to an empty sarcophagus. Using contemporary accounts, the Life magazine interview with Fleetwood Lindley, and the records of the Lincoln Guard of Honor, we tell you why that coffin was opened one last time and what the witnesses saw. Where the sources disagree, we say so.