Lincoln Assassination Tour for Summer Associates

With offices only two blocks from Ford’s Theater, the law firm of Keller and Heckman LLP has developed a different evening event for its Summer Associate program. For the last five or six years, the summers have been able to join with partners, associates, and staff on a tour of nearby sites involved in the Lincoln Assassination.    

Included in the tour is the intersection of 10^th and G Streets, where Lincoln’s son, Robert, fought through the crowd to be with his father when he died; the back lot of the theater, where John Wilkes Booth made his exit after shooting the President; the alley behind the theater where Booth fled the scene; the site of the Herndon House (now the Gordon Biersch Brewing Company), where conspirator Lewis Powell lived; the Patent Office (now the American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery) where Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ball was held and Walt Whitman and Clara Barton served as nurses when the building was used as a hospital; the Post Office (now the Hotel Monaco) where Samuel Morse set-up his first telegraph operation; all followed by dinner at the Wok and Roll Restaurant in Chinatown (formerly Mary Surratt’s Board House, where the conspirators met).

This year featured a special tour of Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office at 7^th and D Streets, NW, by employees of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.  The site is open three days a week and provides a glimpse into Barton’s remarkable career as well as her life in Washington, D.C., during the 1860’s.