This is from a post in a FB group to which I belong. Highly interesting.
George Pullman, the founder and CEO of the Pullman Railroad Car Company, died in 1897 one of the most hated men in America by the country’s working class. His company employed thousands of people at factories and assembly plants across North American and earned billions of dollars per year. In 1892, in response to a severe economic recession, Pullman cut wages for his workers across the board, in some cases as much as 50%. The cuts led to a national strike by Pullman workers in 1894, and is often viewed as the first of America’s modern labor movement.
The strike was felt well beyond the Pullman corporate HQ of Chicago. It essentially shut down commercial and citizen railroad travel for much of the country. It nearly crippled the country. Congress was in an uproar over it, and urged President Grover Cleveland to send National Guard troops to end the strike. The premise for sending the troops, said the government, was that the strike shutting down railroad travel interfered with movement of the US Mail.
The strike was over in days. But the lingering feelings of ill will toward Pullman by the working class did not subside, prompting Pullman to go so far as to change his will, including a paragraph that commands he be buried in a steel cage under an 18-inch slab of concrete to prevent not only grave robbing but desecration in general of his earthly remains. Pullman left his entire estate to his two daughters equally, but obviously not a stake in his company. He named the company’s general counsel, Robert Lincoln, as executor of his will.
Lincoln performed admirably while administering Pullman’s will, and adhered to the burial commands to the letter. He took particular notice of the lengths Pullman went to in order to be certain the grave remained untouched. Robert Lincoln could relate to this. His own father’s gravesite in Springfield had been under constant threat of body-snatching almost from the day of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in 1865. In 1876, thieves had the martyred president’s coffin halfway out of the tomb before being caught by the Secret Service.
So when Pullman died, Lincoln paid attention to the burial instructions, and four years later, in 1901, had his parents disinterred from their tomb, and reburied immediately in front of a colossal memorial that had been dedicated in 1874. Robert Lincoln, to prevent further threats of grave robbing, had his parents buried in a steel cage, under 18 inches of solid concrete. If you need to wonder where Robert Lincoln got the idea to do this as a final solution to the ongoing rumors and threats of robbery at his parents’ gravesite, look no further than the Pullman grave plot at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.