Historic Gathering at Ford’s Theatre
Ford's Theatre offers an unprecedented exhibit detailing Lincoln's Assassination
Next week will be a doozy for Lincoln aficionados. And the Ford’s Theatre campus in downtown Washington is the main place to be, as the site where John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. The 16th president died the next morning.
But while Ford’s has organized specific events for next week, one of the institution’s key highlights is a special exhibition that runs throughout most of May.
“Our goal was to try to bring back most of the key artifacts that were here that evening, and reunite them for the first time in 150 years,” Tracey Avant says. As curator of exhibitions at Ford’s, Avant spent three years gathering items for Silent Witness: Artifacts of the Lincoln Assassination, working with such lenders as the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the Chicago History Museum and the Pike County Historical Society. Ford’s had to take special measures to get some of the items because “they are important and key artifacts for most of the institutions that lent to us.”
Naturally, not every artifact could be returned for display in Washington — including the very chair from Ford’s Presidential Box in which Lincoln was shot. “The Henry Ford Museum wasn’t able to loan that to us,” Avant says. “The chair is just in extremely fragile shape.” (You’ll have to travel to Dearborn, Mich., if you want to see that.) Also unavailable: The bullet that killed the President. That factors into a special exhibition at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, “His Wound Is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln.” Fortunately, the Department of Defense-run museum is nearby, in Silver Spring.
Ford’s exhibit does include the smoking gun — Booth’s single-shot, 44-caliber Derringer pistol. Among other items on display are Lincoln’s silk top hat, Mary Todd Lincoln’s cloak, and the contents of Lincoln’s pockets — two pairs of spectacles, a pocketknife, a linen handkerchief and a brown leather wallet containing a five-dollar Confederate note. “[The spectacles] Lincoln repaired, tying them together with a piece of string. And the top hat with the mourning band that Lincoln added in memory of his son Willie, who died in 1862 — those speak so deeply about Lincoln the person, Lincoln the man,” says Avant.
The most complicated artifact to secure was the carriage that transported the President and Mrs. Lincoln to Ford’s to see the play Our American Cousin. On display at the National Museum of American History, this barouche, on loan from the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Ind., traveled in one piece, so “it had to have a special crate built for it.”
Avant is quick to point out the unprecedented nature of the exhibition as the key reason to see it. “None of these things have been together in the same space for 150 years. It will probably be at least another 50 years before anyone thinks about trying to put them together again.”
Silent Witness: Artifacts of the Lincoln Assassination runs to May 25, including extended viewing hours Thursday evenings until 8 p.m., at the Center for Education and Leadership, 514 10th St. NW across the street from Ford’s Theatre. Call 800-982-2787 or visit fordstheatre.org.
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