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Volume 91 Issue 24 | p. 34
Issue Date: June 17, 2013
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In Lincoln Funeral Train Mystery, Colorful Clues
Microscopy points to precise color of railcar, but spectroscopy may be needed to confirm results
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Viewed
By Carmen Drahl
Crab S
New Ba
Department: Science & Technology
News Channels: Analytical SCENE
Keywords: conservation, paint, history, train, Lincoln, pigment, microscopy
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Microb
Chemis
Pushin
When the U.S. military’s railroad agency constructed an
official railcar for the newly reelected Abraham Lincoln,
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Revers
Gold N
agency officials never imagined that they had built his hearse.
The car, completed in early 1865, was the Air Force One of its
*Most V
day. But the 16th president did not live to ride in it. Instead,
the car, draped in bunting, carried his coffin on a 12-day
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funeral procession from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill.
Mourners flocked trackside to catch a glimpse of the
Oil Pa
assassinated leader. Newspapers ran front-page stories. Yet
even with all those accounts, scholars are fuzzy on a few
CHEM
important details about the car, such as what color it was
painted during an era that predated color photography. Now, a
chemist and a conservator think they have solved that
mystery. An outside expert, however, would like to see results
from a few more tests before declaring the case closed.
IN MOURNING
The question of color looms large for the sesquicentennial of
Lincoln’s presidential car was called the “United States.” This photo is from April
Lincoln’s death in 2015. A Chicago-based group has planned
a reenactment of the historic journey, complete with a
1865.
Credit: Library of Congress
full-scale replica of the car. That group, appropriately named
the 2015 Lincoln Funeral Train, approached Wayne Wesolowski for a color consultation.
Wesolowski, a retiree who works as a chemistry lecturer at the University of Arizona, is rather colorful himself. He’s as eager to talk
chemistry as he is to lament the decline of model trains as a hobby or to describe Lincoln memorabilia for sale on eBay. In the
mid-1990s, while he was a chemistry professor at Illinois’ Benedictine University, he directed the Lincoln Train Project. Part of that
job involved building a 15-foot replica of Lincoln’s funeral car. At that time, however, he had to guess its color on the basis of
6/24/2013 4:41 PM
In Lincoln Funeral Train Mystery, Colorful Clues | June 17, 2013 Issue - ... http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i24/Lincoln-Funeral-Train-Mystery-Colorful...
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conflicting written accounts. The original burned in a 1911 fire.
The entire car was not lost to history, however. Wesolowski tracked down one of
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its windows. It had been removed years before the fire. The window glass
etching, frame size, and hardware match the best photos of the car.
Wesolowski convinced the window’s owner to let him analyze a piece of the trim.
And then he called a friend—Nancy Odegaard from the Arizona State
Museum.
In the museum lab, Odegaard noticed that the fragment had multiple layers of
paint on it. To ensure she was dealing with the original coat of paint, she had to
find the bottom layer. She zeroed in on a section of wood that had been under
the window glass, a spot post-Lincoln-era painters could not access. She
scraped away a few chips of the precious pigment. Then, with a light microscope
and a lamp that mimics daylight, she and Wesolowski searched for a color
match. They used swatch cards from the Munsell color system, an early20th-century paint color standard that’s also been used for soil research.
HISTORIC SLIVER
Wesolowski indicates the various coats of paint on the
piece of window frame.
Credit: Courtesy of Wayne
Wesolowski~history~conservation~train~paint
The paint matched a deep
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maroon shade, Wesolowski says—about 16 parts red to 6 parts black, or
5YR/3/1 as it’s known in the Munsell system. That’s darker than the color he
selected to paint his 1995 model.
However, the deep maroon color may have changed with time, cautions Francesca Casadio, senior conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The extent of change depends on the paint’s chemical composition. Some
19th-century paints were a mixture of carbon black and iron oxide reds in linseed
oil. They likely wouldn’t decompose, she says. But if the paint contained
vermilion pigment or coal-tar dyes, it might have faded even if protected by
glass. Glass only filters some wavelengths of harmful ultraviolet light, she says.
MATCHMAKERS
Wesolowski (left) and Odegaard check color cards
under a Verilux bulb, which mimics daylight.
Credit: Courtesy of Wayne Wesolowski
In addition to a determination of the paint’s composition, Casadio would like to
see color confirmation from a UV-visible spectrophotometer. “Munsell cards are
valid tools, but they can be subjective,” she says.
Wesolowski is looking for collaborators and funding to carry out those chemical analyses on the pencil-sized piece of history.
Thanks to coverage of his work in the mainstream media, he might have more material for follow-up tests. “Because of all this
publicity,” he says, “I’ve been contacted by people claiming to have pieces of the car that I didn’t know survived.”
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society
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