$525K flag that covered Abraham Lincoln’s casket finds home

A one-of-its-kind flag that draped former President Abraham Lincoln’s casket during his funeral procession has found a new home in the Big Apple — at a Midtown steakhouse.

Keens Steakhouse, the 141-year-old white tablecloth joint known for its extensive collection of Americana memorabilia, unveiled the gargantuan, half-million dollar auction find during a private unveiling ceremony Thursday.

“It’s truly a treasure,” Keens Steakhouse general manager Julia Lisowski told The Post of the historic flag, which was used in procession after Lincoln was assassinated in office in 1865.

“It’s a really special and amazing piece of history that we are so honored to have here.”

The 37-star American flag – believed to be the only surviving casket flag from Lincoln’s funeral train from Washington DC to his burial site in Springfield, Illinois – will be permanently displayed in the restaurant’s second-floor “Lincoln Room” treasure trove of presidential artifacts, where history is served alongside mutton chops and Porterhouse steak.

The flag’s new digs marks somewhat of a return home to New York, Lisowski said, as it was commissioned from storied Fulton Street-based flag maker Annin & Company, known as the largest and oldest flag making operation in the nation.

As part of the funeral train procession, it traveled on a 1,600-mile journey through hundreds of US towns in 1865– and even passed through City Hall in Manhattan.

Known as the Applegate Flag due to its provenance handed down through generations of the descendants of army doctor Lewis Applegate’s family for more than 150 years, the flag was first gifted to the physician from Sen. Edwin D. Morgan — who was one of only six Senate pallbearers who rode with the funeral train, Lisowski said.

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From great grandfather’s memories of DC after the assassination:

The gloom of that journey to Washington and the feeling of vague terror and sorrow with which I traversed its streets, I cannot adequately describe, and shall never forget. To this day, I never visit that City without some shadow of that dark time settling over my spirit. All the public buildings and a large portion of the private houses were heavily draped in black. The people moved about the streets with bowed heads and sorrow-stricken faces, as though some Herod had robbed each home of its first born.

When men spoke to each other in the streets, there were tremulous tones in their voices, and a quivering of the lips, as though tears and violent expression of grief were held back only by great effort. In the faces of those in authority — Cabinet ministers, officers of the army, — there was an anxious expression of the eye as though a dagger’s gleam in a strange hand was to be expected; and a pale determined expression, a set of the jaw that said: “The truth about this conspiracy shall be made clear and the assassins found and punished: we will stand guard and the Government shall not die.”

For no ruler who ever lived, I venture to say, not excepting Washington himself, was the love of the people so strong, so peculiarly personal and tender, as for Abraham Lincoln. Especially was this so among the soldiers; all members of the old army will remember with what devotion and patriotic affection the boys used to shout and sing, “We are coming, Father Abraham!” and will remember what a personal and confiding sort of relation seemed to exist between the soldier boys and “Uncle Abe”, and how those brave soldiers — veterans of four years of terrible war, inured to hardship, to sickness and wounds, familiar with the face of death — wept like little children when told that “Uncle Abe” was dead.

The scene at the bedside of the dying President has been described in the Press, and as the news swept around the earth, all the children of men, in all the civilized world, wept with those about his couch. That death-bed scene will never be forgotten. It was surrounded by his Cabinet ministers, all of whom were bathed in tears, not excepting Mr. Stanton, the War Secretary, with iron will and nerve, who when informed by Surgeon-General Barnes that the President could not live until morning exclaimed: ‘Oh, no, General! no, no’, and immediately sat down at his bedside and wept like a little child.

“Senator Sumner was seated on the right of the President’s couch near the head, holding the right hand of the President in his own. He was sobbing like a tender woman with his head bowed down almost to the pillow of the bed on which the President was lying.”

At twenty-two minutes past seven, the President passed away and Mr. Stanton exclaimed, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Besides the persons named, there were about the deathbed his wife and son, Vice-President Johnson, all the other members of the Cabinet with the exception of Mr. Seward, Generals Halleck, Meigs, Farnsworth, Augur, and Ladd, Rev. Dr. Gurley, Schuyler Colfax, Governor Farwell, Judges Carter and Otto, Surgeon-General Barnes, Drs. Stone, Crane and Leals, Major John Hay, and Maunsell B. Field.

There is an unauthorized photograph of Lincoln’s open coffin lying in state when his funeral stopped in New York. There is only slight bowing, and the casked could easily have been flag draped.

The history of the photograph is intriguing.

https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/news/rietveld.htm

More than 50 years ago a 14-year-old boy found a photograph of President Abraham Lincoln in his coffin taken on April 24, 1865, in New York City. The discovery startled historians, because Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, had ordered this photograph to be destroyed. Stranger yet, the one surviving print remained with Stanton, whose son preserved it. This is a first-person account of the discovery, as told by Dr. Ronald Rietveld, emeritus professor of history, California State University-Fullerton.

There is another photograph of the funeral procession passing Washington Square, and five-year old Theodore Roosevelt and his brother are visible in a window in their apartment watching the procession.

“Not to be putting too fine a point on it, but President Lincoln had a six-sided coffin, not a four-sided casket.
Not to be critical, but I couldn’t find any statement in the article that said Lincoln had a four sided casket..

What did I miss?

It’s in the title of the article:

“$525K flag that covered Abraham Lincoln’s casket finds home — in NYC steakhouse”

Caskets, by definition are four-sided, where as coffins are six-sided.

I am being pedantic, like saying “filming” or “video taping” rather than “recording” or “video recording” when using a digital camera.

It’s not you, it’s me. ;o)

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