National Park Service to mark 150th anniversary of Lincoln funeral train

SPRINGFIELD — The National Park Service plans to mark the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession from Washington, D.C., to Springfield.

Commemorations starting this month will take place in cities along the looping route Lincoln’s funeral train took to carry his body back to his home state, Illinois. The cities include Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago.

Programs along that route will feature well-known Lincoln actor Fritz Klein. He’ll explore the 16th president’s notion that the United States was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The commemorations begin April 18 and run through May 3. Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, at Ford Theater in Washington as the Civil War was drawing to an end.