On April 25, 1865, the “Lincoln Special,” as the locomotive bearing the coffin of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln was called, progressed up the Hudson River banks of Manhattan’s west side. A portrait of its honored passenger, who lay in state within, was affixed above the locomotive’s cattle guard.
Writer Henry Cuyler Bunner was only nine years old at the time. But many years later he recalled a day of his “nomadic boyhood” that had placed him in Manhattanville—a town now absorbed by West Harlem—and in the path of that particular moment in history. The solemn event of the funeral train’s approach had steeped Bunner in “the loss the community had sustained in the death of President Lincoln, in April of 1865.”
Bunner’s story, “Tiemann’s to Tubby Hook,” first published in Scribner’s in 1893, recalls the young boy being mustered by the town’s “Crazy Woman” to create funeral bunting from scratch. It also captures a faded portrait of one of New York’s formerly rural uptown districts, typical of many, at a time when a cherished public figure’s death evoked vigorous personal expressions of sorrow. A bygone age well before the dimming of skyscrapers would stand in as the surrogates of civic mourning.
From “Tiemann’s to Tubby Hook,” by H.C. Bunner:
Here, the boys used to say, the Crazy Woman lived; but she was not crazy. I knew the old lady well…
Summoning two or three of us youngsters, and a dazed Irish maid fresh from Castle Garden and a three weeks' voyage in the steerage of an ocean steamer, she led us up to the top of the house, to one of those vast old-time garrets that might have been—and in country inns occasionally were—turned into ball-rooms, with the aid of a few lights and sconces. Here was stored the accumulated garmenture of the household for generation upon generation…These we bore down by great armfuls to the front portico, and I remember that the operation took nearly an hour.
When at length we had covered the shaky warped floor of the long porch with the strange heaps of black and white—linens, cottons, silks, bombazines, alpacas, ginghams, every conceivable fabric, in fashion or out of fashion, that could be bleached white or dyed black, the old lady arranged us in working order, and, acting at once as directress and chief worker, with incredible quickness and dexterity she rent these varied and multiform pieces of raiment into broad strips, which she ingeniously twisted, two or three together, stitching them at the ends to other sets of strips, until she had formed immensely long rolls of black and white.
Mounting a tall ladder, with the help of the strongest and oldest of her assistants, she wound the great tall white columns with these strips, fastening them in huge spirals from top to bottom, black and white entwined. Then she hung ample festoons between the pillars, and contrived something painfully ambitious in the way of rosettes for the cornice and frieze.
Then we all went out in the street and gazed at the work of our hands. The rosettes were a failure, and the old lady admitted it. I have forgotten whether she said they looked “mangy,” or “measly,” or “peaky;” but she conveyed her idea in some such graphic phrase. But I must ask you to believe me when I tell you that, from the distant street, that poor, weather-worn old front seemed to have taken on the very grandeur of mourning, with its great, clean, strong columns simply wreathed in black and snowy white, that sparkled a little here and there in the fitful, cold, spring sunlight.
Of course, when you drew near to it, it resolved itself into a bewildering and somewhat indecent confusion of black petticoats, and starched shirts, and drawers, and skirts, and baby-clothes, and chemises, and dickies, and neck-cloths, and handkerchiefs, all twisted up into the most fantastic trappings of woe that ever decked a genuine and patriotic grief. But I am glad, for myself, that I can look at it all now from even a greater distance than the highway at the foot of the lawn.
Source:
- “Tiemann’s to Tubby Hook,” by H.C. Bunner, from the collection, Jersey Street and Jersay Lane, 1896.
Eric K. Washington - Eric K. Washington is the author of Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem and contributed to the recent MTA-licensed guide book, New ...
Join the Conversation