Ford's Theater National Historic Site is a beautiful restoration of the nineteenth-century playhouse, which continues to stage regular productions of contemporary and period drama. However, because of its role in one of the greatest national tragedies, it lives a double life as a tourist attraction in its own right. It was here, on April 14, 1865, a mere five days after the end of the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln was shot by the actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth during a performance of Our American Cousin .
Entertaining talks (hourly 9.15am-4.15pm; free) set the scene in the theater itself, after which you can file up to the circle for a view of the presidential box where it all happened, and finally go down to the basement Lincoln Museum . Macabre relics here include the clothes that Lincoln was wearing, Booth's .44 single-shot Derringer pistol and the assassin's diary, in which he wrote: "I hoped for no gain. I knew no private wrong. I struck for my country and that alone." The mortally wounded president was carried across the street to The House Where Lincoln Died , the Petersen House, where he died the next morning. That, too, is open to the public, who troop through its gloomy parlor rooms to see a replica of the bed on which Lincoln breathed his last.
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