Lincoln museum reopens at Ford's Theatre

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By Deborah K. Dietsch

The Deringer pistol used by John Wilkes Booth to kill President Lincoln is still on view, along with the 16th president's boots and blood-stained suit. These artifacts remain the most potent objects in the museum at Ford's Theatre, but they no longer hog the spotlight.

After a $3.5 million renovation, the basement venue reopens to the public Wednesday with exhibits concentrated on Lincoln's presidency rather than his assassination. The overhaul of the 1980s museum follows the $22 million remodeling of Ford's Theatre, which reopened in February to mark the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

For anyone who wants to brush up on Lincoln 101, particularly what happened during his four-plus years in office, this is the place to do it.

From caricatures of the office-seekers who swarmed the White House to a video of our living ex-presidents reciting the Gettysburg Address, the museum brings familiar history to life with humor and imagination.

"What we want to communicate here is the personal, political and moral growth of this man," says presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, who helped redesign the museum. "Hopefully, you'll come away with a much greater understanding of Lincoln and how much the nation lost because of Booth."

Mr. Smith sees the Ford's Theatre museum as complementing another significant site in Washington frequented by Lincoln, the restored cottage at the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home where the president and his family resided during the summer months.

In developing the exhibits, the historian collaborated with Split Rock Studios of Minneapolis as he did on displays at the libraries dedicated to the presidencies of Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. The difficulty of the 6,868-square-foot subterranean space at the theater, Mr. Smith says, was working around "a couple dozen pillars" that are now mostly hidden in partitions.

The conceptual challenge, he says, was appealing to a broad spectrum of visitors, from "a fifth-grade student to a Lincoln buff." His experience as executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill., which opened in 2005, led to a similar but more modest and text-heavy approach at Ford's.

The new museum showcases 94 historical artifacts, including a few handwritten letters by Lincoln, his son Tad's toy sword and a piece of White House china. They are enlivened by the stagecraft now routine at history museums, including figural sculptures, re-created building fragments and video projections.

Words and more words, the wall texts and videos' talky narratives offer commentary on everything from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to his love of Shakespeare. However, some of the president's most eloquent speeches are noticeably absent or indecipherable; the 1865 copy of the Emancipation Proclamation on view is written in German by a clerk from Iowa.