While history may say otherwise, Rotarians have long embraced the Rail Splitter as one of their own.
A boy, a bike, a burial
It might have happened something like this.
On 26 September 1901, 14-year-old Fleetwood Lindley is sitting in class at his high school in Springfield, Illinois, when Lucius Castle, the school’s principal, walks into the room. Castle exchanges a few whispered words with the teacher and then asks Fleetwood to join him in the hallway. Your father phoned, says Castle, and asked that you be excused from school. He wouldn’t be specific, but he said you should get on your bike and ride as fast as you can out to the Lincoln tomb. He promises there is something interesting you will want to see.
Fleetwood hesitates until Castle shouts Go! and the boy is out the door and on his bike, pedaling like crazy two miles north to Oak Ridge Cemetery, where Abraham Lincoln had been seeking his eternal rest, in a variety of locations both known and unknown, for the last 36 years. When he arrives, there is a crowd of about 200 people gathered around the tomb. He also sees some heavy machinery, several workmen, and ample evidence that something has been recently dug up.
A crane lifts the coffins of Lincoln and his family from yet another temporary grave in 1901.
The windows in the door leading into the tomb are papered over so no one can see inside. Members of the crowd shout angrily to be admitted. Their cries are ignored, but when Fleetwood knocks, the door is opened and he wheels in his bike and leans it against the wall. There are 22 people inside — 20 men and two women — and a coffin sitting atop two sawhorses. There is a quiet conversation going on, a subdued but intense debate of some sort. Fleetwood takes no part in the discussion. Instead, he stands quietly in the corner and he waits.
While the basic details of this story — young Fleetwood in school, the message from his father, the hurried trip by bicycle to the cemetery, the discussion inside the tomb — are well established, the embellishments are conjecture. Reasonable conjecture based on known facts but conjecture nonetheless.
But this much we know for certain. In the days before his unexpected death in January 1963, Fleetwood Lindley was the last living person to have laid eyes on the face of Abraham Lincoln.
And this: Fleetwood Lindley was a Rotarian. Which was fitting.
The first Rotarian
On 20 July 1916, during an unexpected lull on the final day of the seventh Rotary Convention, the Boston editor and publisher Joe Mitchell Chapple rose to deliver an impromptu speech to the hundreds of hot and restless delegates crammed inside the sweltering Emery Auditorium in Cincinnati. He began by ladling praise on Rotary’s president, Allen D. Albert, “whose genius has made this convention a sweet and inspiring memory.”
Turning his attention to another president, Chapple then made this anachronistic pronouncement: “In reviewing history … I believe the first great Rotarian of this country was Abraham Lincoln.”
Given that Lincoln died in 1865, 40 years before Paul Harris founded Rotary, even Chapple had to admit that historical fact undercut the validity of his remark. But its larger truth could not be denied. When “Lincoln mingled among his fellowmen,” insisted Chapple, he related to them “in true Rotarian style.” And so, “as the hour approaches for the close of this splendid convention,” Chapple urged his fellow Rotarians to return home and “reconsecrate ourselves to the ideals inspired by Lincoln,” a challenge met by warm applause.
Pictured against a copy of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s handwriting are The Lincoln Tomb, Joe Mitchell Chapple (in cameo) and five past Rotary presidents, including Paul Harris (center) and Allen D. Albert (second from left).
Chapple may have been on to something, the kind of truth that Thomas Jefferson, one of Lincoln’s philosophical forefathers, would have called self-evident. Though nowhere in Rotary’s founding documents is Lincoln enshrined as a guiding spirit, there are plenty of examples that he was regarded as one. Growing up in Vermont, Paul Harris was told that “there never has been and there never will be another Abraham Lincoln,” the kind of remark that sticks with a child. And in My Road to Rotary, his late-in-life memoir, Harris wrote that the Gettysburg Address, initially regarded as a failure, eventually “became recognized at home and abroad as the greatest speech ever made in the English language” — an implicit acknowledgment of Lincoln’s unparalleled oratorical skills from Rotary’s master communicator.
Harris’ admiration for Lincoln was shared across Rotary. In February 1929, this magazine (known then, as it was for most of its 115 years, as The Rotarian) noted that “the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln — February 12th — will be observed by Rotary Clubs throughout the United States by special programs stressing the principles of life and government for which the immortal Emancipator fought and suffered.”
One of those programs occurred in Manhattan in 1930. In its newsletter, Spokes, the Rotary Club of New York announced that Louis Warren would be the guest speaker at its luncheon at the Commodore hotel on 13 February. The director of the Lincoln Historical Research Foundation in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Warren later boasted that he had addressed more than 170 Rotary clubs, speaking most often about the Gettysburg Address.
Welcome to Faberuary
Nowhere was Rotary’s regard for Lincoln more evident than in the pages of The Rotarian. His image adorned the magazine’s cover on at least two occasions. In February 1927, the cover featured a moody rendering of the Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue known as the “Standing Lincoln” that presides over Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Thirty-six years later, in February 1963, the magazine showcased what it called (inexactly) “the sad and brooding countenance” of Lincoln as captured by the photographer Alexander Gardner 11 days before the president delivered his Gettysburg Address — which, insisted the editors, remained “one of the greatest of human utterances.”
There’s an obvious pattern here. When February rolled around, The Rotarian stood ready to celebrate the man it once anointed “the greatest exemplar of the principle of Service Above Self.” In February 1916, five months before he addressed the Rotary Convention in Cincinnati, Joe Mitchell Chapple contributed a piece called “Abraham Lincoln — Sir Great Heart.” “Lincoln,” wrote Chapple, “seems to be the personification of the divine fire within ourselves, the inborn craving of the people for self-expression! … We have but to reiterate the sentences of Lincoln’s addresses to find the spirit of a great poet.”
To complement that thesis, that same issue of the magazine included two poems evoking Lincoln. The New York author and editor Amos Russel Wells wondered “what follies had been spared us, and what strain, / Had Lincoln lived!” and concluded that, with Lincoln dead, “Ten million lesser Lincolns must arise.” A second, shorter poem, written by Chapple’s brother Bennett, imagined Lincoln as a great oak that
Rose from the soil, with all its virgin power
Emplanted in him for the fateful hour
When he might brood a Nation in its strife.
Both poems, along with 94 others, had appeared a year earlier in The Poets’ Lincoln, a book released by the Chapple Publishing Co. Among the “poems” included: the Gettysburg Address.
From the cover of and articles in The Rotarian to club lunch programs and books by members of Rotary — and by Rotary’s founder — Abraham Lincoln is a looming presence in the Rotary zeitgeist. Life magazine even included an interview with a Rotarian in a memorable 1963 issue.
The Saint-Gaudens statue, or, more accurately, a later iteration of it, made another appearance in The Rotarian in February 1951. Under the headline “Abe Lincoln Walks Abroad,” California Rotarian Harold F. Humbert wrote about his encounters with Lincoln devotees in 27 countries. Following a Rotary lunch in Leicester, England, a guest explained to Humbert how he had supervised the erection of London’s Standing Lincoln in 1920. “He described the care with which the replica of Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture [a gift from the people of the United States] was shipped, and the deep emotion that stirred him as he guided its unwrapping and placement.”
Situated in London’s Parliament Square, the statue, said Humbert, embodied Lincoln’s aspiration, as expressed in his second inaugural address, that we “do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
A pilgrimage into the past
Not all Rotarian articles spouted such noble sentiments. Sometimes they simply told a good story. A February 1929 article recounted the time in 1842 that Lincoln nearly fought a duel. A diminutive Illinois official, insulted by satirical letters written by Lincoln and his future wife, demanded satisfaction; the tall, muscular Rail Splitter chose cavalry broadswords to settle this affair of honor. Cooler heads prevailed, and as it was about to commence on a Mississippi River sandbar, the duel was avoided.
Thirty-two Februaries later, in 1961, a more sensational Rotarian story, set in the South Pacific, involved vengeful cannibals and a captured American sailor. This true tale ended happily with the sailor rescued by a Hawaiian missionary, who received as reward a gold watch from President Lincoln.
When it wasn’t able to tell Lincoln’s stories itself, The Rotarian alerted readers to books that could. In March 1965, with apologies to “Lincolnianists” for not posting the announcement a month earlier, the magazine heralded the arrival of Louis Warren’s latest book, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration. And in December 1993, just in time for Christmas, it recommended Webb Garrison’s The Lincoln No One Knows.
A former pastor and college dean, a prolific author — he’d write more than 50 books before his death in 2000 — and a Rotarian from North Carolina, Garrison devoted his 1993 book to answering 38 questions about Lincoln. Some of his conclusions were startling. Consider question 26: “A racist by today’s standards, how did [Lincoln] become the Great Emancipator: a crusader for racial equality?” After examining that query for 10 pages, Garrison concluded that the “hope and freedom given to slaves and ex-slaves” by the Emancipation Proclamation “were almost incidental,” and that this document, “which brought freedom to multitudes, has had the long-range effect of reducing the personal freedom of every American who is subject to the still-expanding power of the chief executive.”
After nearly 300 pages of such speculations, what great truth had Garrison garnered? “This odyssey has not produced greater understanding of [Lincoln’s] inner man, but less.” Time to turn elsewhere.
When The Rotarian wasn’t revisiting the past on the page, it was in the present exploring places associated with Lincoln. Acting as tour guide for these excursions was Clarendon E. Van Norman of Galesburg, Illinois. In February 1954, when Van Norman was governor of Rotary’s District 212, he wrote an article for the magazine entitled “A Rotarian in Lincoln Land.” He followed that, in February 1963, with “Lincoln and the Land That Shaped Him.” While visiting the Illinois towns where “Honest Abe still walks,” Van Norman kept bumping into the similarities between the precepts of Rotary and Lincoln’s own thinking. As he considered the amicable sentiments expressed by Lincoln in an 1842 speech in Springfield, Van Norman wondered, “Isn’t that where we start in Rotary — with acquaintance, friendship?”
But why read about the Lincoln sites when you could visit them for yourself? In the April 1923 issue of the magazine, the Rotary Club of Springfield, which “long ago recognized that the ideals of Rotary are the ideals of Lincoln,” extended a full-page invitation to “all Rotarians and friends attending the St. Louis Convention [in June] to make a pilgrimage to the city where Lincoln lived and which Lincoln loved and where all that is mortal of him now reposes.”
Hundreds of Rotarians accepted the invitation and traveled to Springfield, where they received a special bronze medal with Lincoln’s profile on one side and the Rotary wheel on the other. The highlight of their visit was a 23 June picnic followed by a procession to Oak Ridge Cemetery, where Lincoln was eulogized as “the greatest Rotarian of all time.” “Long after many of the details of the convention in St. Louis have faded from my mind,” said a Rotarian from New Zealand, “I will remember the Rotary services at Lincoln’s tomb.”
Returning to the realm of reasonable conjecture: Were you to look closely at the Rotary pilgrims clustered around Lincoln’s tomb, you might very well expect to glimpse 36-year-old Fleetwood Lindley standing among them.
“Something I’ll never forget”
On 23 May 1901, Robert Todd Lincoln, the last surviving child of Abraham Lincoln, was in Springfield to arrange for the reburial of his father for what he must have hoped would be the final time. After his assassination in April 1865, Lincoln had been interred in a temporary holding vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. Over the next 36 years, his body had been moved, often furtively, one might even say appallingly — picture the coffin of the martyred president hidden for two years beneath a pile of lumber — more than a dozen times.
The receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery where Lincoln was first interred, a plaque on the vault and Fleetwood Lindley as a boy.
Some of those moves were orchestrated by a group of apprehensive Springfield worthies known in their last incarnation as the Lincoln Guard of Honor. Their apprehension was not without cause: In 1876, an attempt to steal Lincoln’s body had been foiled at the last minute, and the threat that another attempt might follow loomed large in the minds of the nine members of the honor guard. Their members included a railroad ticket agent named Joseph Perry Lindley. And Joseph was the father of Fleetwood, whom we last saw waiting patiently inside the Lincoln tomb alongside a red cedar casket and a group of people engaged in quiet debate.
In 1900, during extensive renovations of Lincoln’s Springfield tomb, his body, as well as those of his wife and children, were removed to a temporary underground burial vault. During his May 1901 visit, Robert gave specific instructions for his father’s burial. Rather than keep Lincoln’s coffin in the marble sarcophagus where it had ostensibly lain for decades, Robert instructed that it be buried 10 feet below the tomb’s tile floor, enclosed within a steel cage and encased by 20 inches of Portland-cement concrete.
Furthermore, because the coffin had been opened in 1887 (and on three other occasions before that) to ensure his father’s body lay within, Robert instructed that it was not to be reopened again. Which, on 26 September 1901, was the cause for the debate inside the tomb. With Robert not present, the group ultimately decided to open the coffin. “They said it was for identification,” said Fleetwood years later, “but I think curiosity had a good deal to do with it.”
A plumber and his assistant came forward with their tools and cut away an oblong portion of Lincoln’s lead-lined casket. “A pungent odor rose from the casket as they lifted the plate, and there was the head and chest of Mr. Lincoln,” recalled Fleetwood. “His face was readily recognizable. It seemed to be covered with a moss-like mold, the color of frost. I was not scared at the time, but I slept with Lincoln for the next six months.”
After about 25 minutes, the plumber resealed the coffin. “I was allowed to hold one of the leather straps as we lowered the casket [within its steel cage] into the vault,” Fleetwood said. “Concrete was then poured over the casket and the vault filled to floor level.”
Life went on. In 1909, Fleetwood graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in business administration and toured Europe for 13 weeks with his cousins. In 1918, after the United States entered World War I, he was commissioned a second lieutenant, trained in Georgia with a company of machine gunners, and was discharged without seeing action following the armistice. He served on the county draft board, as Springfield’s city clerk, and as president of the board of managers at Oak Ridge Cemetery.
Most of all, Fleetwood was a florist, running a beloved store with a big adjoining greenhouse on the outskirts of Springfield. Even today, years after Lindley Floral closed, the place stirs fond memories. “It was one of my favorite places to visit as a child,” recalled one man in 2024. “I remember the wonderful scents and fragrances, the tiled wall fountain with goldfish swimming beneath it in the pool, and what seemed like endless rows of plants in the greenhouse.”
One more biographical detail: Fleetwood was a joiner. He was, among other things, a Shriner, an Elk, a Mason — and a member of the Rotary Club of Springfield, and on at least one occasion, in speaking to his fellow Rotarians, he told them the story of what happened inside Lincoln’s tomb on that September day in 1901. “What I saw,” he said, “was something I’ll never forget.”
In late January 1963, while awaiting gall bladder surgery at Springfield’s St. John’s Hospital, the last living person to have laid eyes on the face of Lincoln told his tale to a reporter from Life magazine. “[Lincoln’s] face was chalky white,” he said. “His clothes were mildewed.” Suffering from a heart condition, the tale-teller died two days after the interview. On 2 February, he was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery, where, like Lincoln himself, the Rotarian Fleetwood Lindley now belongs to the ages.
This story originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.