The Fillmore Funeral Train That Wasn't

Fillmore Funeral Locomotive
Created in Affinity Designer by the Author

The locomotive in the 1874 image was resplendent with polished brass and ornate decorations. A portrait of Millard Fillmore, the late president who had just died in March of that year, graced the side of the engine. A star-studded crest of American flags overlaid by the American eagle graced the tender. The side of the headlight was painted with a scene of Niagara Falls, a tribute to Fillmore’s upstate New York roots . Perhaps the only presidential funeral train with more patriotic decorations was that of Abraham Lincoln, nine years earlier. 

But unlike Lincoln’s train, Millard Fillmore’s funeral train never existed. Not only were the decorations on the side of the American Type 4-4-0 locomotive never installed, the locomotive itself was never built.  So why does this image exist? An art project I began awhile back provided the path that led me to unearth at least some of this strange story. 

Even as a kid, I had something of an artistic bent. I’d returned to dabbling in drawing and painting many times over the years - not that I ever stuck with it or got particularly good at it. Soon after personal computers were introduced, I was drawn to the graphics potential of these computers, but the programs that were available in those early days had very limited capability.  That has all changed. The power of reasonably priced graphics software has reached a level that people could only dream of a few years ago.  Recently, I bought a vector graphics software package called Affinity Designer for fifty dollars. Vector graphics software is based on nodes, lines and bezier curves and is infinitely scalable which means that the smallest detail and largest object can be rendered with equal clarity. 

Like all art techniques, graphics software requires practice and persistence to master the nuances of the tools. Much of this can be learned by trying to emulate or copy other work. Originality is not the objective, rather, command of the tools is the goal. Looking around the web, I saw that others had chosen images of cars, airplanes, or even cartoon characters as their models for replication. But I was looking for something different. I wasn’t sure what but it needed to have well-defined lines and not be too complicated. 

I thought of one of my favorite repositories for old images - the Library of Congress. Browsing through their Popular Graphics Arts collection, I found a lithograph dated  from 1874 titled simply, Railroad Engine. It looked like it might just do the trick. It appeared to consist of just a few circles, rectangles and other basic shapes. How long could it take to replicate it? 

Railroad Locomotive Lithograph, 1874, Library of Congress

I plunged into digitally tracing the drawing without giving the origin of the image much thought. I had seen other such prints of locomotives over the years. Engines of this era were often embellished with fancy ornamentation  and I assumed this was just another such locomotive from one of the many manufacturers of the day. The more I worked with the image, the more I began to appreciate the underlying design of this machine. Engineering has long practiced the maxim, “form follows function". But while this was evident in the locomotive design, the balanced proportions and the clean lines of many of the parts suggested a designer who cared for more than function alone. This was intended to be admired as a work of engineering art. 

 Being an amateur student of the history of technology, I knew a bit about old steam locomotives. But I certainly didn’t understand the details of how all the components contributed to the smooth operation of this machine. To do justice to this image, I wanted more information so I could represent the parts correctly.  When I am looking for information like this, one of my go-to places is Google Books. Google has scanned thousands of out-of-copyright books from academic libraries and placed them online with open access. Browsing under the topic of steam locomotive, I found the perfect guide, The Catechism of the Locomotive, by Matthias Nace Forney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_N._Forney.

First published in 1875, Forney’s illustrated six-hundred page book provides a complete guide to the design and operation of steam locomotives. His book contains almost 1,300 practical questions and answers for the novice locomotive designer or operator. The book was so well received, it continued to be published in revised editions for the next fifty years.

Detail from Catechism of the Locomotive

With the help of Forney’s book I made sense of the image I was tracing. I could see the details of the various parts and how they interconnected, what made it a functional machine. 

To trace all of the details in this image required a high resolution copy of the original lithograph. Fortunately, the Library of Congress has an online scan of the original print that is very high resolution. At 300 dots per inch, the image measures thirty-six inches long by twenty inches high. With such a high a resolution, I was able to trace every nut and bolt on the locomotive. No detail seemed to have been omitted. As my work continued, I became more curious about the origins of the image. 

As noted on the print, it was the designer, A.J. Johnson, not the lithography company who submitted the print to the Library of Congress.  A stamp in the lower left corner noted that the print had been received by the library in the same year it was created -1874.

W.J. Morgan Company was listed as the publisher of the lithograph. A little searching found that the lithography company was founded in Cleveland, Ohio shortly after the Civil War by two brothers: William J. and George W. Morgan. Their business focused mostly on broadsheets, pamphlets, and later, theatrical posters. They also produced fine lithographs for stock certificates and other needs. 

Bridge Lithograph by W.J. Morgan Co. 

Detail of Lithograph

But the lithograph of the locomotive had no visible commercial connection. It seemed not to be an advertisement for a manufacturer of locomotives. Why would the Morgan Company invest time and effort to produce this piece? Why would Johnson think it should be in the Library of Congress? The answer may be found by studying the details of the locomotive. 

Detail of Lithograph

The library record and the lithograph itself lists A.J. Johnson as the locomotive designer. A Google search of that period for the name found no one by that name who designed steam engines. I also searched online in old railroad magazines and books from the era but found no reference to A.J. Johnson. Who was he?

I began to wonder if perhaps the portrait on the side of the engine was that of President Andrew Johnson and the locomotive designer was a coded hint as to the name of the person in the portrait. President Andrew Johnson had no middle name and the builder was specifically listed as A.J. Johnson. Nor did the portrait look much like Andrew Johnson except perhaps in style of dress. I concluded that A.J. Johnson and Andrew Johnson were not the same man.

Andrew Johnson

Image on Side of Locomotive

I checked the U.S. Census records for Cleveland for 1870 and 1880 using the online databases at Ancestry.com. When I put in a rough guess of his age as 25, the search engine soon found an A.J. Johnson listed as living in Cleveland in 1870. The census listed him as being born in Ohio in 1848 and gave his occupation as being a  “Locomotive Builder”. I thought this might be my man.

In 1870, A.J. Johnson was a twenty-two year old living in a commercial hotel with a dozen other men with various occupations. No spouse was mentioned as living with him. The designation on the census of “locomotive builder” was most likely a bit of a personal exaggeration on A.J.’s part although I’m sure that is what he wanted to become. By the time of the 1880 census, AJ. Johnson was still living in a Cleveland boarding house but now he listed his occupation as “Riveter”. 

1870 Census Cleveland, OH

1880 Census Cleveland, OH

While A.J. (the name recorded on the census)  seems not to have had much of a career as a locomotive designer, he seems to have drawn at least one locomotive - the one in the lithograph. But this still didn’t answer how Johnson got connected to the W.J. Morgan Lithography Company. Did Johnson approach the Morgan Company to see if they would publish his design as a way to advertise his skills? Perhaps. Given his age and boarding house residence, it seems unlikely he would have had the cash to pay for such a printing project.

No, I think this lithograph emerged by serendipity. in 1874, W.J. Morgan Company was expanding into markets outside of Cleveland. They were developing a reputation for high quality lithographs. Eventually, they would claim to be one of the largest lithography companies in the United States. Morgan Company was looking for a way to place themselves before a broader audience - a national audience - and grow the business. 

With not much else to go on, I continued to search the web for any other information I could find about this particular locomotive image.  I got a hit at the Getty Images archive. The identical image was listed in their database but there it was identified as the Fillmore Funeral Train. Unlike the Library of Congress who had gotten the image directly from A.J. Johnson, Getty Images listed their source as a private collector of lithographic prints. The collector had entitled the print the "Fillmore Funeral Train". 

Millard Fillmore as Congressman

That sent me in search of information about our 13th president, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore died on March 8, 1874 in Buffalo, New York. Fillmore had lost a bid for re-election in 1856 and returned to his native Buffalo where he was a leading citizen of the city throughout the Civil War and post-war years. Could the portrait be that of Fillmore? Comparing an image of him taken by Matthew Brady in 1850 with the image on the side of the locomotive made me think that it was indeed Fillmore. But why would W.J. Morgan print an image of a locomotive with Fillmore on the side?

Image of Fillmore on Side of Locomotive

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April of 1865, his funeral train made a long and circuitous journey from Washington, D.C., back to Springfield, Illinois where he was buried. One of the many stops along the route was Buffalo. Ironically, Fillmore was out of town at the time. Lincoln’s funeral train was met by tens of thousands of mourners at every stop on its journey to Illinois. The flag-draped train bearing Lincoln’s sarcophagus was emblematic of the fallen leader. His funeral train became synonymous with a proper funeral for a dead president. 

Of course, Fillmore had died in his home city of Buffalo and no funeral train was ever planned or used to carry his body to its final rest. But I would be willing to bet that either William or George at W.J. Morgan Company reasoned that if they created a lithograph of a steam engine with Millard Fillmore’s image and resplendent presidential trimmings, they could sell this image to the people of the country to mark the passing of another president. They just needed an image of a steam locomotive. While many manufacturers of steam locomotives might have been only too happy to provide an image for the project, Morgan Company must have reasoned that an unaffiliated design would be seen as less an endorsement of any one manufacturer. The company would surely not have wanted to create bad blood with potential future advertisers. 

Enter A.J. Johnson with his highly detailed drawing of a locomotive. The timing was right for a “collectible" tribute to Fillmore. Morgan Company only had to do have one of their artists embellish Johnson’s design with Fillmore and other Americana and they would have their image. 

And so was created a locomotive that never existed, decorated for a presidential funeral that never happened. But the image lives on and its elegant design is a clear testament to the design aesthetic of that era. 

Uncolored Tracing of Lithograph

Vector Graphics Colorization Detail in Affinity Designer

I began the project as a way to learn a new software tool. I hadn’t anticipated a detective story. Of course, I may be wrong about all this - but I think this contains much of what transpired in 1874. A.J. Johnson might never have built a locomotive but he has been immortalized as a locomotive designer by his image housed at the Library of Congress. 

Oh, and as for my software learning project, well, I would say it was a success. After tracing and shading hundreds of objects, I think I have it figured out. There’s just no substitute for practice.