During my trip around the United States in 2017 my family and I stayed in an AirB&B in the town of Gettysburg, site of the tremendous three day battle that took place in July 1863. The whole town is like a living museum, one shopkeeper telling me “if you walk a few doors down you’ll see the bullet holes in the wall,” me expecting a few holes that I would have to look for – no there must have been hundreds peppered into the side of this building!
But along the main road into the town is a tiny museum called the Lincoln Train Museum, a number of rooms dedicated to the history of the town and the train that carried the body of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln across the states. Inside there is a model train that runs on a track and stops at different stations, each one telling a story as it stops with images and information around the room showing how people mourned their leader after he was gunned down in a theatre in 1865.
A mock-up life-sized train carriage beckoned you inside to take a seat and watch a short video about the museum and what story it was telling, a guy dressed as Lincoln up on the screen talking about where the train stopped, the events during this period and what happened after. At the end of the video a rendition of “God Bless America” came out of the speakers with a very patriotic flying of flags across the screen, just in case you didn’t know where you were of course!
There were a number of display cases that piqued my interest, one of them had some very interested items relating to the 9/11 attacks, an event that probably overshadows all other events in US history today. Leading from that onto items about Pearl Harbour and the Civil War.
Not a very big museum, but it was packed with really interesting items relating to the history of the United States from the last 150 years. As my wife and I left the building, a memorial statue was outside, upon closer inspection it was dedicated to a man who had spent his life researching and promoting the history of Abraham Lincoln – the man in the video – who had died a few years before. It was nice that the museum could honour his memory of all his hard work with a monument.
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Richard M. Jones is an author and historian specialising in disasters and shipwrecks along with two World Wars. Spending his time between Hampshire and Yorkshire, he has put up 12 memorials to victims of forgotten tragedies and published 19 books along the way.