Artifact-of-the-Month

Friday, September 6th, 2019

President William McKinley’s assassination on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition left the entire nation and particularly the host city of Buffalo is a state of shock and grief. In the aftermath, decisions needed to be made quickly about what private and public – if any – ceremonies should be held in Buffalo to honor this incredibly popular president. These difficult choices were left up to the Pan-Am’s committee on celebrations. One can imagine that this wasn’t a type of “celebration” that the men on the committee ever anticipated being asked to organize. Only days before, they were celebrating a long-awaited, successful visit by the current president of the United States and a day that saw over 116,000 people attend the fair. Now they were being asked to plan that same president’s funeral.

Working in consultation with the new president (Theodore Roosevelt), the Cabinet, and other officials, it was originally decided to hold a small, private funeral service at 5 p.m. on September 15th at Milburn House; the body would remain at the house through the night before leaving on a train to Washington, DC. With this plan in mind, invitations were issued to prominent Buffaloians, national and international dignitaries, as well as family and close personal friends who had gathered by McKinley’s deathbed. As President Roosevelt’s hosts, Ansley and Mary Grace Wilcox were included on this exclusive list of invitees; their invitation is our Artifact-of-the-Month.*

After the invitations were printed, however, another group of prominent Buffalo citizens approached the committee and encouraged them to consider allowing the public to pay their respects to the fallen president. They hoped that the committee would agree to have McKinley lie in state in the rotunda at City Hall.  After consulting with the Cabinet and Mrs. McKinley, it was agreed that the private service could be moved up to 11 am to allow for a public viewing between noon and 5 pm. Invitations were then modified by hand and, it appears, hand-delivered. In an effort to keep the area around the Milburn house quiet and to preserve the privacy of the grieving family, admittance to the neighborhood was by invitation only. 

On the morning of September 15th, Ansley and Mary Grace Wilcox traveled with TR by carriage up Delaware Avenue to the funeral services. Arriving shortly before 11 am, TR was seated near the head of the coffin, with Ansley next to him. Reverend Dr. Charles Edward Locke, pastor of the Delaware Avenue Methodist Episcopal, conducted the service, which lasted twenty minutes. The length of the service was intentionally kept short as Mrs. McKinley originally insisted on attending. That morning, however, she remained in her room at the top of the stairs, able to hear the service even if not able to physically participate. The service included two of McKinley’s favorite songs – “Lead, Kindly Light” and “Nearer, My God to Thee” – performed by Kate Tyrell, Clara Barnes, Raymond Riester, and George C. Sweet.

At the conclusion of the service, President McKinley’s body was taken on crowd-lined streets to City Hall. Over 100,000 people waited in long lines, at times in the pouring rain, to view the President’s body. Originally planned to last only five hours, the line was finally cut off at 11:20 pm with the doors closing at midnight. Soldiers guarded the body overnight until 8 am, when it was moved to a train bound for Washington, DC. 

What amazes me the most is how a handwritten correction to an event’s start time led me to a much larger and more interesting story. To research this post, I was able to find information regarding the private funeral service, down to the smallest details, in the Site’s collection of historic newspapers that have been digitized and are available on-line through the Theodore Roosevelt Center (https://tinyurl.com/y3b995ww). The level of detail that the newspapers captured always astonishes me (did you know that two different newspapers included lists of everyone that attended the service?) and are an invaluable resource for the Site’s staff when trying to research the smallest details of the events of September 1901.

*While many of these invitations probably still exist (the TR Site also has one addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Frank McGraw), we were thrilled when a descendent of Ansley’s first daughter, Cornelia “Nina” Wilcox Bull, donated Ansley and Mary Grace’s invitation to the historic collection in 2007.

-- Amy Sanderson, Collections Manager

Tags: ,

« Back to Blog