Weekly Column
Each week a small segment of Vernon County history is published in the county papers.
For the week of 2/2/2025
by Kristen Parrott, curator
Winter is a great time to work on your family history research! The first genealogy class of 2025 will be held on Thursday, February 13, at 10AM, at the Vernon County History Center. The class session will focus on a review of tools and tricks for successfully using the genealogy website ancestry.com.
This website is very useful for anyone researching people of the past, no matter whether the people are on your family tree or not. Billions of historical records, including census, immigration, and military records, are available on the website, and they are searchable. You can start with as little information as a name and an approximate birth or death date, and end up with the outline of a whole life.
New students are always welcome to join the class. Vernon County Historical Society members attend for free, and non-members are asked to pay $5 per class session. Classes are held in the first-floor, wheelchair-accessible conference room.
Winter is also a good time to start planning for summer! A volunteer fair will be held at the Vernon County History Center on Saturday, February 22, from noon to 4PM, to recruit volunteers for the 2025 summer season at the Sherry-Butt House. The Vernon County Historical Society owns and operates this gracious historic house, located at 795 N. Main St. in Viroqua.
Have you ever wondered about volunteering at the Sherry-Butt House? Are you interested in finding out about local history, and giving tours of this 1870’s-era home? The volunteer fair will be an opportunity to learn more. It will be held in the history center’s conference room. Training for volunteers will be provided at a later date.
The Sherry-Butt House, Viroqua, in winter. Photo by Roy Torgerson.
For the week of 1/26/2025
by Kristen Parrott, curator
Our first history program of the year will be held on Tuesday, February 4, at 7PM, at the Vernon County History Center in Viroqua. All programs are free and open to the public. Civil War historian and re-enactor Frederick Beseler, formerly of La Crosse and now of Houston, MN, will give his presentation, “Now He Belongs to the Ages”, about President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train.
Lincoln lived in Springfield, IL, when he was elected to the presidency in 1860. In early 1861, he travelled by train from Springfield to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration. The engineer of that train was actually a Vernon County man, David H. Pulver.
Pulver was born in New York in 1833, and moved to Wisconsin in 1847. In 1855, he arrived in Springville, Vernon County, where he worked as a blacksmith and wagon maker for many years. But he also worked as a train locomotive engineer, particularly during the Civil War. That’s how he came to be driving the train that Lincoln took to his inauguration.
President Lincoln was assassinated in April, 1865. His coffin lay in state in Washington, D.C., for several days, and then was placed on a 9-car train that carried him back to Springfield for burial. This train, called the “Lincoln Special”, followed the same route as the train that had originally brought him to Washington for his inauguration.
These were the early days of train travel in the U.S. The funeral train had originally been designed to carry the President from place to place as he fulfilled his duties, but it was repurposed to carry and display his coffin after his violent death. It attracted huge crowds during the journey of nearly 1700 miles, stopping in large cities for ceremonies and moving slowly through the countryside as people lined the tracks to say a final farewell.
The train arrived in Springfield in early May. A large funeral was held, and Lincoln was buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery. Many military officers attended the funeral, including another Vernon County person, Capt. Marshall C. Nichols.
Nichols was born in Illinois in 1838, and moved to Viroqua in 1852. He was a merchant, but in 1864, as the Civil War raged on, he became a soldier. Nichols raised a local company, Co. I of the 42nd WI, and served the unit as captain. At Lincoln’s funeral, he was one of 12 officers in attendance from the 42nd WI.
Join us on February 4 to learn more about this interesting chapter in U.S. history. The evening will begin with a brief business meeting for Vernon County Historical Society members to approve this year’s budget.
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