Surratt Commission and Anna Surratt

[L Verge]

Love that site! "The funeral carriage was the work of official New York undertaker Peter Relyea. According to Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kuhnhardt, Jr., "He had been issued a permit to transport Abraham Lincoln — dead of 'pistol shot wound' — through New York on his way to Springfield, Illinois. For three days, right out on the streets at the junction of East Broadway and Grand Street, Relyea had been building the elaborate New York funeral car before marveling crowds. He had been living with it, sleeping there with it, and up to the last available second adding one more flag or plume or silver star. Now a little before one o'clock in the afternoon Relyea led his glorious catafalque into the park enclosure in front of City Hall, and walking in front of the sixteen gray horses, he turned the hearse car entirely around so that it would face west and be ready to set forth for the procession up Broadway. The Relyea work of art just about paralyzed all beholders with its magnificence. Its platform was huge — fourteen feet long and almost seven feet wide. Up on the roof of the canopy was a gold and white temple of Liberty with a half-masted small flag fluttering from its dome, a fitting crown to the twelve big craped national flags that rose in clumps of three from each column."

The eleventh photo down on the right-hand side (right below the train route map) is almost identical to the watercolor that I was shown years ago.