3 score and 15 years for Redlands’ Lincoln site
Honest Abe usually is associated with Washington, D.C.; Springfield, Ill.; Gettysburg, Pa.; or Kentucky, his birthplace. But Redlands?
The quaint San Bernardino County community houses the only Lincoln memorial west of the Mississippi, thanks to oil magnate Robert Watchorn.
“There were many parallels in the lives of Lincoln and Watchorn,” said Larry Burgess, historian and director of the A.K. Smiley Public Library and Lincoln Memorial Shrine. Both men rose from lowly beginnings to great success, he said.
“Watchorn identified with many traits he had in common with Lincoln: little formal education, emotionally strong mama’s boys, distant relationships with their fathers, strong physical attributes, experience with the sting and exhaustion of hard physical labor, and an ambition to make a better life,” Burgess said in an interview.
The Lincoln shrine is behind the library, a 1898 Moorish-style landmark at 125 W. Vine St. For 75 years, the shrine has served as a tribute to Lincoln, a research center for scholars and a museum for Civil War buffs.
Watchorn built it in 1931 and 1932 to honor the 16th president and Watchorn’s son, Emory Ewart Watchorn, a World War I bomber pilot whose death in 1921 was related to his service.
The collection encompasses letters, diaries, manuscripts and nearly 10,000 Civil War books and pamphlets, including:
* The April 15, 1865, New York Herald, its headline blaring news of the assassination.
* A copy of Lincoln’s 1863 Amnesty and Reconstruction Proclamation, which anticipated the end of the war and extended an olive branch to most Confederates.
* Bibles autographed by Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.
* Thirty-five signed Lincoln documents and letters, including a rare missive dated Aug. 26, 1863. In it, Lincoln defends the deployment of black soldiers and urges the public to accept them. Only three copies were made at the time, Burgess said: One is at the Library of Congress, one is at the Illinois State Historical Library and the third is in Redlands.
The letter, read to a rally of Union supporters, told those who opposed black soldiers that “you’re not willing to stand up for them, but they are willing to die for you,” Burgess said.
One of the most valuable items is a Norman Rockwell painting, titled “Thoughts on Peace on Lincoln’s Birthday.” Donated by the artist, the illustration appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on Feb. 12, 1945.
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Watchorn was born in Alfreton, England, in 1858. He started working in the coal mines at age 11 for 27 cents a day. In 1880, at 22, he headed for America with $10 in his pocket.
He drifted to the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where he came to admire Terence Powderly, leader of one of the nation’s early labor unions, the Knights of Labor. Powderly recognized leadership skills in Watchorn and encouraged him with books and tales of Lincoln, Burgess said.
With a thirst for knowledge and a desire to make something of himself, Watchorn joined the union movement. He became the first secretary and treasurer of the United Mine Workers of America, which won mine-safety requirements and higher wages for miners.
In 1891, Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Pattison appointed him chief factory inspector.
In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Watchorn commissioner of immigration on Ellis Island, where he maintained a more or less open-door policy for immigrants. He banned the policy of temporarily detaining immigrants who didn’t have the $10 required to enter the country. He also ended detention of those accused of minor crimes and crusaded against steamship and railroad grafters who took immigrants’ last dollars.
In 1909, he left government and moved with his wife, Alma, and their son to Los Angeles, where he became treasurer of Union Oil Co.
By 1915, he’d left Union to become a wildcatter. He made a fortune in Kansas and Oklahoma with wells that still produce today.
On a trip to New York in 1912, he bought a massive marble bust of Lincoln from sculptor George Grey Barnard. The $10,000 purchase kick-started his collection.
In 1921, their son died at 26 of pneumonia related to his wartime service. Emory had flown over the Alps in an open cockpit; exposure to the brutal elements had weakened his lungs and triggered years of ailments.
Again, Watchorn’s life paralleled Lincoln’s: Both had lost two young sons. Decades earlier, Robert Watchorn Jr. had died as a toddler.
The grief-stricken Watchorns moved to Redlands, near their longtime friends, the Smileys.
Watchorn spent $60,000 erecting the Lincoln shrine to house his collection and honor his son. It includes a model of Emory’s Caproni bomber.
Elmer Grey, the architect who designed the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Pasadena Playhouse, designed the octagonal room where the Lincoln bust sits. On the domed ceiling, muralist Dean Cornwell painted heroic female figures symbolizing Lincoln’s character, including justice and courage. (Cornwell’s murals also adorn the Los Angeles Central Library.)
Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt donated books about Lincoln. Descendants of Civil War veterans contributed artifacts -- including a Medal of Honor and a drum that had belonged to Los Angeles resident Benjamin Hilliker, who had been a 17-year-old drummer boy, Company A, 8th Wisconsin Infantry.
On June 4, 1863, Union soldiers were badly outnumbered at Mechanicsburg, Miss., near Vicksburg. Hilliker put down his drum, picked up a rifle and charged the enemy’s front lines, according to his 1916 obituary in The Times. Hilliker was shot in the head and left for dead. Hilliker’s descendants said he wrote years later that the incident left him only with “a bad-looking face, where good looks might have served me better.”
The shrine was dedicated on Feb. 12, 1932, Lincoln’s birthday. Historian and playwright John Stevens McGroarty wrote about the event for The Times, noting that black singers “from whose throats surged in deep cadences the sorrow songs that their people knew in the days of bondage.” He wrote that many of the singers were descended from Israel Beal, a former Virginia slave who became a Redlands pioneer.
Watchorn died in 1944, at 86, leaving an endowment now valued at $2 million for the shrine’s support.
But the memorial’s yearly acquisitions budget is paltry: $50,000.
“We can’t compete anymore,” Burgess said. “Everything has gone sky high.... When I started here in 1972, you could find a signed, simple Lincoln document for $2,000. Now, that same document goes for at least $15,000.” He blamed the inflation on wealthy private collectors.
At a recent event, held annually around Lincoln’s birthday, about a dozen soldiers of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry wielded swords and showed visitors how to load and cock a musket. An actor portraying Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln’s last wish, Burgess said -- voiced the day he was assassinated -- was to come to California.
And in a way, he has.
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