WARNING: Don’t read if squeamish:
I recall seeing an 1950s Life Magazine that had a picture of the last man alive who saw Lincoln’s corpse. After Lincoln’s son took control of the situation, the casket was hidden under the caretaker’s home. Eventually it was put into its current location and tons of cement poured on top of it. Before this was done, again according to LIFE, the casket was opened to verify it still contained the man’s body. It did. The face, according to this witness, bore a sad, melancholy expression.
I remember this, too. It was about 1896, and Lincoln’s face was intact, except that the eyebows are partly missing. No wonder since they must have pumped his body with embalming fluids. It was seen by many thousands in an open casket in Philadelphia and New York, and took more than a week to get home. The article had a line that haunts me: something like the last man still alive who had seen the face of Abraham Lincoln. That meant something special to me. My great-grandmother was a child during the civil war and had spent time in a cave inside of a besieged Vicksburg. Her uncle, a Choctow indian, was kiled during the battle. So as late as WWII, the Civil War was a living memory, and when my great-aunts spoke of “the War,” they weren’t talking about World War II. I guess the South is the last part of the country to have a sense of history, despite the efforts of the New Age to reduce reality to myth. Anyway, in 1940 Abraham Lincoln stood as close to me in time as Franklin Roosevelt does today.
**I recall seeing an 1950s Life Magazine ***
I remember that article also. It also mentioned that Lincoln’s face had been whitened with chalk as the skin had turned very dark.