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Ford’s Theatre

The theater where Lincoln was shot, and the house across the street where he died

Local name: Ford's Theatre

Collection: Washington, D.C. · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The theater’s front on 10th Street
The theater’s front on 10th Street · Tim Brown, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is Ford’s Theatre. Here, on the evening of the fourteenth of April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot. The building went up in 1833 as a Baptist church. In 1861 the theater manager John Ford bought it and turned it into a theater. In 1862 it burned down, and in 1863 Ford opened a new one. Five days after the main Confederate army surrendered, Lincoln and his wife came here to see the comedy Our American Cousin. At about a quarter past ten in the evening, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer, entered the presidential box. He shot Lincoln in the head, leapt to the stage and escaped. The wounded president was carried across the street to the Petersen house, where rooms were rented to boarders. Lincoln was six feet four inches tall, so he was laid diagonally across the bed. He died at 7:22 in the morning on the fifteenth of April. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Booth was cornered twelve days later on a farm in Virginia and shot. After the assassination the government banned performances here. The building held offices and an Army medical museum. In 1893 its floors collapsed, killing twenty-two clerks. The theater was restored and reopened on the thirtieth of January 1968. It is still a working theater: plays are staged in the evening, and visitors come during the day.

Visiting

511 10th Street NW. Open daily, with entries every half hour from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.; closed on Thanksgiving and December 25. You need a timed ticket, best booked in advance on fords.org, at least a day ahead. A few tickets are sold at the box office on the day. The visit includes the museum, the theater, the Petersen House and an exhibit on the aftermath of the assassination. The theater is sometimes closed for performances and rehearsals.

Photos

The auditorium; Lincoln’s box is at upper right
The auditorium; Lincoln’s box is at upper right · Northern-Virginia-Photographer, CC0, Wikimedia Commons
The Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln died
The Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln died · Billy Hathorn, CC0, Wikimedia Commons

Sources

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