Ford's Theatre

Ford's Theatre is where the course of American history turned on the night of April 14, 1865. As President Abraham Lincoln watched a comedy from the presidential box, the actor John Wilkes Booth slipped in behind him and fired a single shot, then leapt to the stage and escaped. Lincoln died the next morning across the street — the first American president to be assassinated. Today the restored theatre operates both as a living stage and as a museum to that shattering event.

The building began as the First Baptist Church of Washington. After the congregation moved out, the theatrical manager John T. Ford leased it and converted it into a music hall; it opened as Ford's Athenaeum in 1861. When fire destroyed that structure in 1862, Ford rebuilt it grandly, and Ford's Theatre opened in August 1863, quickly becoming one of the capital's most popular playhouses.

On the evening of April 14, 1865 — just days after the surrender at Appomattox effectively ended the Civil War — Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin. John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer, entered the presidential box and shot the President in the head, then jumped to the stage, reportedly shouting 'Sic semper tyrannis!' Lincoln was carried across the street to the Petersen House, where he died the following morning, April 15.

Booth was cornered and killed in Virginia twelve days later, and several conspirators were hanged. The government seized Ford's Theatre, and for decades it served the War Department as offices and storage; in 1893 part of the interior collapsed, killing 22 workers. The building was finally restored to its 1865 appearance and reopened in 1968. Run today by the National Park Service with the Ford's Theatre Society, it presents plays and preserves a museum whose collection includes the derringer Booth used.