Ford's Theatre: Baptist Church, Assassination Site and the 1893 Collapse

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The building on 10th Street began in 1833 as the second meeting house of the First Baptist Church of Washington, led for nearly 30 years by Pastor Obadiah Bruen Brown. John T. Ford bought it in 1861 and opened Ford's Athenaeum, which burned in 1862 and was rebuilt as a modern theater. On April 14, 1865, five days after Appomattox, about 1,700 people watched Our American Cousin when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the presidential box, slashed Major Henry Rathbone, leapt to the stage, broke a leg and stabbed orchestra leader William Withers Jr. on his way out.

Ford tried to reopen in July 1865 with The Octoroon, but public outrage led Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to send troops to close the building. Congress paid Ford $88,000 and barred it from public amusement. The interior was gutted into three floors for War Department records, the Surgeon General's library and the Army Medical Museum. On June 9, 1893, excavation for an electric plant undermined a pillar and the floors collapsed, killing 22 clerks and injuring 68. A Lincoln museum opened in 1932, and the restored theater was dedicated in 1968.

Samuel J. Seymour, age five in the audience, lived until 1956 as the last witness.
Lincoln was laid diagonally across a bed in William Petersen's boarding house and died at 7:22 a.m.
Melvin D. Hildreth and Senator Milton Young pushed for the restoration starting in 1945.
The museum holds Booth's diary, the derringer and the box door with Booth's peephole.
The 1896 purchase of the Petersen House was the federal government's first purchase of a historic home.

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