Abraham Lincoln didn’t expect to dodge cannon blasts during his train trip from Springfield, Ill., to Washington, D.C., for the presidential inauguration in 1861.
Then he arrived in Ravenna, Ohio.
More than 1,000 people, including 100 schoolchildren, waited three hours in the cold at the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad Depot in Ravenna to catch a glimpse of the president-elect’s train Feb. 15. Most of the town’s 1,777 residents were gathered as the train approached around 3 p.m.
Col. Charles S. Cotter, a Middlebury native, called out the Ravenna Light Artillery to give Lincoln a thunderous salute.
“The approach of the train was greeted with a double-loaded cannon, which boomed its welcome far and wide,” the Cleveland Herald noted.
It had earlier been announced that Lincoln wouldn’t speak in Ravenna, but the excited crowd was so insistent that the 6-foot-4, gaunt, bearded president-elect felt obligated to step onto the train’s platform.
Feeling a bit under the weather and nursing a hoarse voice from too many speeches along the train trip, Lincoln still managed to deliver a five-minute address in Portage County.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I appear before you merely to greet you and say farewell,” Lincoln began. “I have no time for long speeches, and could not make them at every stopping place without wearing myself out. If I should make a speech at every town, I should not get to Washington until some time after the inauguration.”
The Ravenna audience laughed. The inauguration wasn’t until March 4.
“I am, however, all the time sensible of the deepest gratitude to the people of Ohio for their large contribution to the cause which I think is the just one,” Lincoln continued. “There are doubtless those here who did not vote for me, but I believe we make common cause for the Union.”
Here, according to a Portage Sentinel transcript of the address, spectators interjected such comments as “That’s so!” and “We are with you there!”
“But let me tell to those who did not vote for me, an anecdote of a certain Irish friend that I met yesterday,” Lincoln said. “He said he did not vote for me, but went for [Stephen] Douglas. ‘Now,’ said I to him, ‘I will tell you what you ought to do in that case. If we all turn in and keep the ship from sinking this voyage, there may be a chance for Douglas on the next; but if we let it go down now, neither he nor anybody else will have an opportunity of sailing it again.’ Now, was that not good advice?”
The crowd interjected enthusiastically: “Yes! Yes!” and “That’s the talk!”
A light snow fell as Lincoln wrapped up the speech amid cheers and applause: “Once more, let me say goodbye.”
Before departing, Lincoln’s train picked up Ravenna banker Horace Y. Beebe, one of five delegates from Ohio who switched their vote to Lincoln at the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Lincoln rewarded Beebe’s allegiance with a train trip to the Washington inauguration.
Ravenna native William R. Day, who served as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1899 to 1903, was a 12-year-old boy who witnessed Lincoln’s 1861 speech in Portage County. As Day recalled during a 1910 visit to his hometown:
“The reverberating echoes of the guns of Cotter’s battery gave a welcome salute to the appearance of the tall form of the newly elected president on the platform of the car … his quaint suggestion if he tarried too long at stopping places he wouldn’t make it to Washington until after his own inaugural.
“Who was wise enough then to foresee that we looked into the face of one whose patient strength and gentle but prevailing wisdom were to lead this nation through four years of deadly strife to final triumph for the Union?”
Before the train chugged out of Ravenna, the Ravenna Light Artillery delivered another thunderous volley. Maybe a bit too thunderous, really. It startled everyone on the train, including the president-elect and his wife.
“As the train moved, the cannon gave a parting shot,” the Cleveland Herald reported. “So loud were the discharges that a window in the forward car, and another in the rear car by which Mrs. Lincoln was sitting, were shattered to pieces.”
If it hadn’t been for the train’s drawn shades softening the concussion, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln could have been showered in jagged glass. Security guards upbraided the artillery for firing the cannon too close to the train. Lincoln left Ravenna with the town’s appreciation ringing in his ears.
The location of Lincoln’s 1861 visit is easy to overlook today on the western edge of downtown Ravenna. The depot and tracks are long gone.
A small plaque near the Arby’s restaurant at 417 W. Main St. pays tribute to one of the most memorable days in the city’s history: “At this site on February 15, 1861, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural train stopped at the Cleveland & Pittsburgh RR station to pick up Horace Y. Beebe of Ravenna. Beebe’s convention vote had ensured Lincoln’s Republican nomination in 1860.”
The Portage County Historical Society dedicated the marker in 1985 to the memory of local historian Dudley S. Weaver (1908-1984).
A Lincoln impersonator attended the dedication and Civil War re-enactors from the 16th Artillery Battery of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry fired a cannon.
Fortunately, no windows were shattered.
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.