1938

Former President William Howard Taft (above) dedicated the
Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall on May 30, 1922.

At the time, Taft was serving as chief justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court. A crowd gathered on the Mall to witness
the ceremony.

The neoclassical monument honors 16th U.S. president 
Abraham Lincoln. Congress authorized construction of
a monument to Lincoln on the Capitol grounds in 1867
(two years after his assassination), but it took until 1911
for funding to be approved; construction was then
slowed due to World War I.

     
       
        
        
        
        
        
       
William Howard Taft (left) President Warren G. Harding (center) and Todd Lincoln, the eldest son of Abraham Lincoln. 
      
 

Postcard photo of the Southern Pacific’s “Sunset Limited” train as it traveled between Los Angeles and San Francisco, c. 1910s.

The Southern Pacific Railroad completed its transcontinental “Sunset Route”
from New Orleans to California, consolidating its dominance over rail traffic
to the Pacific.

One of the most powerful railroad companies of the 19th century, the “Espee”
(as the railroad was often called) originated in an ambitious plan conceived in
1870 by the “Big Four” western railroad barons: Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. A year earlier, the Big Four’s
western-based Central Pacific had linked up with the eastern-based Union
Pacific in Utah, creating the first transcontinental American railway. With
that finished, the “Big Four” began to look for ways to increase their control
over West Coast shipping, and decided to focus their efforts on extending
the California-based Southern Pacific southward.

Early 20th-century postcard of the “Sunset Express” train passing
through Yuma, Arizona.

Wally Schirra shown climbing from the Apollo 7 Command Module
into a recovery raft.