Many incarnations for Ford’s Theatre

After Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, Ford’s Theatre was closed. Even so, instead of quietly spending

that century as another Washington tourist attraction, the old building was to have a surprisingly busy time, including experiencing another tragedy.

The Petersen House, the boarding house across the street where Lincoln had been carried after the shooting, also had a lot of post-assassination history.

Theater owner John T. Ford tried to reopen Ford’s in July 1865, but authorities decreed that the place must stay closed and eventually paid Ford $100,000 for the title to the building.

Incredibly, instead of preserving the theater as a memorial, the government converted it into office space for Civil War records. The building also was used to store medical specimens from the Army.

Sometime in early August 1865, the Quartermasters’ Department began tearing out the interior. The new first floor was divided by four longitudinal walls running from front to back. The center had an open courtyard from the ground to a skylight, with galleries around it where clerks worked.

The third floor was set aside for the U.S. Army Medical Museum. The Army’s medical bureaucracy also took over the Star Saloon building on the south side of Ford’s. It was there that John Wilkes Booth had drunk heavily before going back to the theater to shoot the president. The first floor of the saloon became a medical laboratory, so at least there still was plenty of alcohol on hand.

The second floor was set aside for the surgeon general, and the third floor was given over to his assistants. The building on the north side of Ford’s was set aside for photographers working for the surgeon general.

There was one intriguing reference in Washington’s Evening Star on Oct. 7, 1865: “The box in which the ever-to-be remembered tragedy was enacted has been preserved entire, and will be placed as near as possible in its former position.”

It’s an arresting image: clerks working around the presidential box, the box surrounded by office desks. Yet the original box no longer exists. The one in Ford’s is a reconstruction.

There is a related item in the New York Times of June 21, 1931. Lincoln’s eldest and only surviving son, Robert, made a career for himself in public life, in both business and politics. According to the Times: “In later years he frequently visited the box in which Lincoln was shot and sat there long hours trying to figure out what might have happened had he been there.”

Robert had been invited along that night but had decided not to go. “Could Booth have opened the door with another chair in the box? Would Robert’s presence have hindered the assassin, gained time and diverted the bullet?”

One can imagine Robert Lincoln visiting Ford’s every now and then, trudging past the desks, the filing cabinets and the specimen jars to sit down in the box once again, lost in thought.

Meanwhile, for the next 28 years, Ford’s was crammed full with almost 500 government employees. The place was poorly lit and damp. Staff members knew they were working in an unsafe building. Despite the overcrowding, there was just one iron stairway, 4 ½ feet wide, at the southwest corner. Nobody had bothered to install a fire escape.

Apart from the crowding, the medical specimens preserved in alcohol were a fire hazard. No doubt the clerks were relieved when the jars were removed in 1887 to a new building (no longer standing) on the Smithsonian grounds, but the Ford’s office remained poorly built and overloaded. The inevitable happened on June 9, 1893, at 9:30 a.m.

Story Continues →