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Lincoln Museum to focus on end of 16th president

April 06, 2008 @ 02:04 PM

Herald-Dispatch.com

HODGENVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Iris LaRue wants to take visitors to this central Kentucky town on a walk through Abraham Lincoln’s life.

LaRue, director of the Lincoln Museum in Hodgenville, is preparing an exhibit called “The Death of the President,” scheduled to open Tuesday to mark the day he was shot and killed in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.

“It is full circle,” LaRue said.

Lincoln’s hometown — he was born near Hodgenville and lived in the area until he was 7 — has mostly focused on his boyhood and life during his bicentennial birthday celebration.

A large bronze statue of the mature Lincoln has presided over downtown for the past century, although a young one will soon join it.

The exhibit will stay on display during the town’s daylong statue unveiling celebration May 31. That day’s events will focus on Lincoln the boy.

The new exhibit will help fill out the picture, LaRue said. It will feature the trappings of his funeral and burial while helping illustrate the scope of his journey from a humble farm boy to a man who moved a nation. It will also give “people an opportunity to learn how we dealt with the ceremonies behind the death of an American president,” LaRue said.

Indiana-based Batesville Casket Co. will provide the coffin and Bennett-Bertram Funeral Home will help install it.

“It’s very ornate, quite an outstanding piece of work,” LaRue said

The exhibit also will feature wall panels depicting Lincoln’s funeral train, which took a convoluted and northerly route from Washington to Springfield, Ill. The panels include a map of the trip and list of some of the train’s scheduled stops, to the minute.

“They had this planned out like clockwork,” LaRue said.

The museum is also displaying a variety of items from the funeral, including a procession program, a death mask, and a replica of the derringer John Wilkes Booth used to shoot the president.