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Hats off! The flag...! Shade your eyes down this vista and summon your
imagination. Do you see, falling across these columns, the shadow of a
great president and hear out of the past the distant marching of feet
and the sound of muted fife and drum?
These columns at the O street entrance of Antelope park, between 23rd
and 24th, were once a part of the old federal building in Washington.
Standing between them Abraham Lincoln once reviewed the Civil war
troops. Easterners, who live in an atmosphere crowded with reminders of
the historic great, would smile at such a thin fancy—at attempting
somehow to draw Abraham Lincoln across the Missouri river. So far as
history shows, the east bank of the Missouri is as far west as Lincoln
ever traveled. In the early years of the 60’s he was the guest of
General Dodge in Council Bluffs, invited there to help decide where the
eastern terminal of the Union Pacific should be. As we recall an early
account, Lincoln stood on the bank of the Missouri and gazed westward,
but even “on a clear day” such as we like to boast of from the Missouri
on west, he could hardly have seen the little village which later would
bear his name.
When the treasury building was remodeled in 1907 these sandstone columns
were bought by Cotter T. Bride of Washington, a personal friend of
William Jennings Bryan. He presented them to the city of Lincoln in
1916.
Halfway between the columns is a bronze tablet relating the origin of
the pillars. The tablet, weighing 450 pounds and made from material
saved from the battleship Maine, was presented to the city by the U. S.
W. V.