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.

The building was being held up by vertical iron columns with horizontal girders laid across them. The key word is “laid” — the girders were not riveted or bolted into place. Consequently, when the front area of the first floor caved in, at least one girder slipped loose. The whole jerry-built framework of 1865 collapsed in a moment. The front of the second floor fell in, and then the front of the third.

Altogether, 22 employees were killed and 68 injured. One rescuer got particular attention in the press. An 18- or 19-year-old black man named Basil Lockwood climbed up a telegraph pole to the third-floor rear, carrying a ladder. When it proved too short to bridge the gap, he placed one end in a third-floor window, then leaned forward and wrapped his leg about the ladder’s near end. He saved about 15 people in this way.

The June 1, 1884, edition of The Washington Post wrote that Lockwood “suffered serious internal injuries from his exertions in holding the frail bridge in place.” Because of this, he lost his job as a laborer. After some lobbying by the survivors, he was rewarded with a job as a messenger in the War Department.

Sometime in May 1894, however, there was a “general dismissal” of some of the staff — Lockwood among them.

What of the original presidential box? Perhaps it was destroyed in the disaster and lost to history. Its fate remains a mystery.

After repairs, the old theater was still used as an office for military records. On July 30, 1894, clerical staff, numbering just 260, moved back in. The Star of Aug. 1, 1894, reported: “The structure has now been repaired in such a manner that it is now considered absolutely safe by government experts.”

By 1932, the military records finally were moved out. On Feb. 12, Lincoln’s birthday, Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Grant III, director of public buildings and parks, officially reopened the old theater as a museum.

There was no reconstruction of the original interior. Visitors would see black lines painted on the floor, outlining where the stage and presidential box had been. Painted footprints showed Booth’s path from the presidential box to the back door, lending a Monty Python-like touch to the place.

The only informative part of the old theater was a large collection of Lincoln memorabilia in rows of wood-and-glass museum cases. Even this could not be credited to any efforts by the U.S. government but to a private collector of extraordinary resolution, Osborn Oldroyd.

If it had not been for Oldroyd, a great deal of Lincoln history would have been lost. Ford’s would have been a museum with almost no Lincoln relics to display.

Quite early in life, Oldroyd had become a great admirer of Lincoln’s. After the assassination, he dedicated himself to collecting every Lincoln relic he could find. In 1893, Oldroyd and his wife, Lida, moved into Petersen House with the by-then massive collection.

Oldroyd became a well-known character around Washington during those almost 30 years. He made a point of visiting all the major Civil War battlefields. Sometimes he would simply walk there.

When he wasn’t giving tours or walking about, Oldroyd added to his collection. By 1926, it contained more than 3,000 items — books, magazines, newspaper articles, letters, a split rail — and there wasn’t room in the Petersen House to show it all.

That year, the U.S. government bought it all for $50,000.

There was a brief ceremony at the old boarding house the afternoon of Aug. 30, 1926, in which a check for the amount was given to Oldroyd. The items were later moved into Ford’s Theatre for the aforementioned 1932 reopening. Oldroyd didn’t live to witness the reopening; he died in 1930.

In 1932, Grant, the buildings and parks director, initiated a program to fully restore the Petersen House. Period furniture was brought in to supplement original items, duplicating as far as possible the original layout of the place.

In 1964, the government decided to fully restore the Ford’s interior. Starting on Nov. 30, the place was closed. While the work was going on, the Actors’ Equity Association persuaded authorities to let Ford’s become a working theater again as well as a memorial for Lincoln.

A great deal was learned about the structure of the theater and the earlier “repairs.” In 1966, work crews found that the iron girders holding up all three floors still were not bolted into place. The girders were still laid across a supporting beam. This time, the government was thorough. It was careful to reinforce the building with pilings, underpinning and bracing. Steel bars and reinforced concrete also were used.

Ford’s reopened on Jan. 21, 1968.

After 103 years, Ford’s Theatre was back in business.

John Lockwood is a Washington writer.