Fords Theater

Dates: May 20th (Tuesday) or May 22nd (Thursday)

Website: https://fords.org/

Location: Online! See your e-mail for the Zoom Link 

Coming up: Next week, we will be visiting the San Diego Zoo! In order for us to prepare and make sure we get enough tickets, please fill out this survey here:

This week, we are taking a virtual trip to Ford's theater, the site of the Lincoln  An educator from the theater will be coming to talk to us about Lincoln's assassination that took place there as well as the former president's legacy. In this week's online lesson, Tara has prepared some background for you about the theater building itself, as well as some information about the assassination.  But before we jump into that, let's test our knowledge with this just-for-fun quiz. Once you finish the quiz, you can click the button again to check your answers. 

The Ford's Theatre building was first constructed in 1833 as the First Baptist Church. In 1859, the structure was abandoned as a place of worship. John T. Ford, a theatre entrepreneur from Baltimore, leased the building in 1861. A church board member predicted a dire fate would fall anyone who turned the former house of worship into a theatre. In 1862, Ford renovated the theatre and performances began. 

"Our American Cousin" was the play performed at the theater the night Lincoln was shot. You can find the text of it free here on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3158/3158-h/3158-h.htm

There were three prices for tickets that evening, as printed on the playbill:

· Orchestra Level (lower, main level, toward the stage) – 1 dollar

· Dress Circle (Balcony level) and Parquette (back of the Orchestra)– 75 cents

· Family Circle (Upper Balcony Level) – 25 cents

With the exception of the State Box, where the President and his guests were seated, the boxes were not in use that evening. Those tickets were much pricier and sold by the box, rather than by the individual- $10 for an upper box and $6 for the lower boxes.

Other than the private boxes, the ticket prices were reasonably affordable. According to Thomas Bogar’s Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, the $1 for the Orchestra seats would have bought a 5 pound sack of sugar, or five haircuts, or ten shots of liquor, or a third the cost of a night in a respectable hotel in 1865 Washington D.C.

In July of 1865, theatre owner John T. Ford was ready to resume performances, but emotions ran high against the reopening.

Fearing threats from city residents, and the unseemliness of resuming theatrical productions, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered the theatre closed and posted a military guard to ensure the closure.

The federal government negotiated a deal with Ford to rent the building with an option to buy. In the fall of 1866, a Brooklyn firm removed the entire interior of the building and converted it into a federal office building for $28,000. There were very few alterations that were made to the façade, the roof, and attic, but three floors of office and storage space were created inside. The government purchased the structure for $100,000 in 1867. This new office building briefly was intended to store the captured records of the Confederacy, and was instead used to meet a storage need for Army medical records.

On June 9, 1893, the interior of the historic building collapsed. Twenty-two government clerks died in the tragedy and sixty-eight others were seriously injured. Within a year, the damage was repaired, and the former theatre was remodeled into a government warehouse, with more alterations to the interior.

The building remained in this form until 1931 when workers returned to modify the first floor. It was converted into a museum dedicated to displaying artifacts of the life of our sixteenth president. Many of the museum’s artifacts were from the Osborn Oldroyd collection which had previously been displayed in the Petersen House (the house across the street where Lincoln died) and had been purchased by the U.S. government for $50,000 in 1927.

Fun Facts:

Osborn H. I. Oldroyd (1842-1930) was a Civil War sergeant, writer, and collector of Lincoln memorabilia. Oldroyd married Lida A. Stoneberger in 1873 and the two had one daughter, Daisy Oldroyd. The family moved to Springfield, Illinois and rented the former home of Abraham Lincoln, which Oldroyd converted into The Lincoln Museum in 1884. On view was Oldroyd's expanding collection of Lincoln memorabilia. After the Lincoln home was donated to the State of Illinois in 1893, Oldroyd moved his family and Lincoln collection to the Peterson House in Washington, D.C., where Lincoln died. He sold the 3,000 piece collection to the U.S. government for $50,000 in 1925. The government moved the collection to the Ford Theatre, where Lincoln had been assassinated. You might find this article about Oldroyd interesting (The full story is a bit shadier than this: even though a lot of the stuff in his collection was stolen, Oldroyd still saved history): https://www.illinoistimes.com/springfield/the-first-abraham-lincoln-presidential-museum/Content?oid=11451890

During the 1950s a bill was introduced in Congress by Senator Milton R. Young of North Dakota to fund the restoration of Ford’s Theatre to its 1865 appearance. In 1964, Congress appropriated the funds and in 1968, the fully restored Ford’s Theatre reopened as a working theatre, 103 years after the assassination of President Lincoln. Also, in 1968, the Ford’s Theatre Society became a partner with the national park service.

The site was designated as the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site in 1970, and today is co-managed by the National Park Service and the Ford’s Theatre Society as a part of the National Mall & Memorial Parks. It is now a working theatre, historical monument, world-class museum, and learning center.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, while attending a special performance of the comedy, "Our American Cousin," at Ford's Theater President Abraham Lincoln was shot. Accompanying him at Ford's Theatre that night were his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, a twenty-eight year-old officer named Major Henry R. Rathbone, and Rathbone's fiancée, Clara Harris. After the play was in progress, a figure with a drawn derringer pistol stepped into the presidential box, aimed, and fired. The president slumped forward. 

The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, dropped the pistol and waved a dagger. Rathbone lunged at him, and though slashed in the arm, forced the killer to the railing. Booth leapt from the balcony and caught the spur of his left boot on a flag draped over the rail, and broke a bone in his leg on landing. Though injured, he rushed out the back door, and disappeared into the night on horseback. 

For a more in-depth overview of the assassination and the theater on that night, go on a video tour of the state box and stage with a national park ranger. (13 minutes) :

A doctor in the audience, Dr. Charles Leale, immediately went upstairs to the box. The bullet had entered through Lincoln's left ear and lodged behind his right eye. He was paralyzed and barely breathing. He was carried across Tenth Street, to a boarding-house opposite the theater, but the doctors' best efforts failed. Nine hours later, at 7:22 a.m. on April 15th, Lincoln died.

At almost the same moment Booth fired the fatal shot, his accomplice, Lewis Powell (alias Lewis Paine, Lewis Payne), attacked Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward, at his home on Lafayette Square. Seward lay in bed, recovering from a carriage accident. Powell entered the mansion, claiming to have a delivery of medicine from the secretary's doctor. Seward's son, Frederick, was brutally beaten while trying to keep Powell from his father's door. Powell slashed the secretary's throat twice, then fought his way past Seward's son Augustus, an attending hospital corps veteran, and a State Department messenger.

Powell escaped into the night, believing his deed complete. However, a metal surgical collar saved Seward from certain death. The secretary lived another seven years, during which he retained his seat with the Johnson administration, and purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.

There were at least four conspirators in addition to Booth involved in the mayhem. Booth was shot and captured while hiding in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died later the same day, April 26, 1865. Four co-conspirators, Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt, were hanged at the gallows of the Old Penitentiary, on the site of present-day Fort McNair in Washington DC, on July 7, 1865.

If you'd like to learn more about the assassination, you might find this article from History Channel interesting: https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/abraham-lincoln-assassination

It feels wrong to talk about Ford's theater and the assassination without talking more about Abraham Lincoln; however, in order to keep this lesson shorter, I left information about Lincoln out because we will be learning more during this week's Zoom presentation. However, here are some resources if you want to learn more about him:

You can view his bio from the White House Historical Association here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/abraham-lincoln/

Tune in this week to learn more about Ford’s Theater, the life of Lincoln, and Washington, D.C.!

https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.OLDROYD

https://www.nps.gov/foth/learn/historyculture/faq-fords-theatre.htm

https://washington.org/find-dc-listings/fords-theatre

https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/articles-and-essays/assassination-of-president-abraham-lincoln/

https://fords.org/