Abraham Lincoln Tomb Documentary

[Houmes]

I completely understand why RTL took the drastic measures he did to protect the remains of his father. There had been a near successful attempt to steal his body. The coffin had been opened at least 17 times to "verify" the late president's identity. (There is also no doubt in my mind that the coffin would still be periodically opened up to our present day...to test dna etc)

But surely, there [i]must have been a way of securing the poor man's remains without locking him away in a block of concrete, like some gangland mafioso! It just strikes me as so sad that AL, so lonely and isolated in life, reposes that way in death too...separated from the family who adored him.[/i]


In 1876, the same year of the attempt to kidnap Lincoln's body there was a successful grave robbery in New York City, hijacking the body of Alexander Stewart, a prominent multimillionaire. The body of George Washington, our first president, was an intended victim in 1830 (when a Mount Vernon gardener snatched the wrong skull from the family crypt) and again in 1831. More recently, Elvis Presley almost left the building in 1977 when an inept gang planned to steal and ransom his body.

Robert Todd Lincoln had every right to be a little paranoid regarding his father's remains. After George Pullman's death in 1897, when Robert Lincoln assumed presidency of the Pullman railway car company, he witnessed the family's extreme care taken for burial of their paterfamilias. George Pullman was vehemently despised by his railway workers due to poor working conditions in 1893 and 1894, resulting in a nationwide strike. The family feared a kidnapping, ransom, and possible desecration of the body. His coffin was sealed inside an 18 inch thick block of concrete, then covered with tar paper and asphalt. More concrete was poured over it, a layer of steel railroad rails were placed and bolted together over that, and finally another layer of concrete.