Ford's Theatre

On the night of April 14, 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln during a performance of “Our American Cousin” in the presidential box on the theatre’s dress circle level. Lincoln was carried across Tenth Street to the Petersen House, where he died the following morning. Booth escaped through the stage door and was killed twelve days later at a Virginia farm.

The National Park Service restored and reopened the theatre in 1968 as both a working performance venue and a museum. The basement museum holds Lincoln’s deathbed, Booth’s single-shot derringer, the clothes Lincoln wore that evening, and a large collection of artifacts documenting the assassination and its immediate aftermath.