Armory Square Hospital was built in the second year of the Civil War, approximately where the National Air and Space Museum stands today. In its three years of existence, the hospital staff treated more than 13,000 wounded and ill patients, the worst cases that could make the train or boat ride from the battlefield.

Dr. Charles Leale, who stopped President Lincoln from succumbing in the box at Ford’s Theatre, worked at Armory Square.

When the hospital closed in 1865, the last issue of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette, said, “One cannot conceive of a gun-shot wound that has not been treated here.”

Source: si.edu, website of the Smithsonian 

George Armstrong Custer, an 1861 West Point grad, was the youngest officer to attain high rank in the Civil War. He served as an aide to Gen. George McClellan until Gen. Ambrose Burnside took command of the Army of the Potomac.

Although Custer met a bad end when he led 264 men to massacre by the Sioux in 1876, his legend lived on, largely thanks to his wife Elizabeth. Mrs. Custer lectured about her fallen husband, and even wrote a children’s book that promoted him as a role model for manliness.

The ornate funeral car that carried President Lincoln’s body from Washington, D.C. to its burial in Springfield, Ill., was destroyed by first in the early 1900s. No color photos are known to exist.

The train car was described, in various publications, as claret red and chocolate brown. No one knew for sure until this March 27. That’s when chemistry professor Wayne Wesolowski solved the mystery.

Weslowski, who teaches chemistry at the University of Arizona, was dogged in his pursuit of history. After years of trying, he finally convinced the owner of a window frame from the train car to allow him to analyze a tiny chip of its paint.

Along with a conservator experienced in color-matching, Weslowski hunched over a microscope and sprinkled specks of paint against the rare paint sample.

The answer: The car was a deep maroon — 16 parts black and four parts red.

Source: Funeral Train Mystery Solved by Anne Ryman, The Arizona Republic

“The Last Hours of Lincoln” by Alonzo Chappel hangs in the Chicago Historical Society.

Even if the walls were rubber, it would be impossible to shoehorn all the people Chappel painted into the 18×10-foot back bedroom.

The picture is accurate in one aspect though. All of the people pictured did visit the room during President Lincoln’s last hours.

Paintings of the dying and dead were popular in the Victorian age. Chappel’s painting sold well.

Source: Proquest Historic Newspapers, Chicago Tribune, “Artist Drew Two Score and Seven to Lincoln’s Deathbed” by Michael Kilian

John Downing Jr. wrote a letter as he sat beneath the unfinished stump of the Washington Monument on April 26, 1865. In it, he described the soldiers there who were playing a dirge in honor of President Lincoln.

As he wrote, Downing noted that African-Americans who had been slaves months before were passing by with their happy children.

Source: “We Saw Lincoln Shot” by Timothy S. Good

Lt. A.S. Crawford told investigators he was sitting about five feet from the door of the president’s box, watching the play, when John Wilkes Booth interrupted during the third act. Crawford thought Booth was intoxicated. He also noticed a glare in Booth’s eye.

Crawford was about to make a remark about that to his companion when he heard a shot fired. He jumped to the door of the box but Maj. Henry Rathbone, the president’s theater companion, asked him not to let anyone in the box. Crawford sent for a surgeon.

Crawford’s description of the killer: “He very strongly resembled the Booths. What attracted my attention particularly was the glare in his eye… He was a rather good-looking, short-necked fellow about five feet eight inches high with grayish pants, I think.”

Mother’s Day was not celebrated until May 9, 1914, but President Lincoln acknowledged his own mother in a letter to a young woman whose father died in battle in 1862. He wrote:

“All that I am or hope ever to be, I get from my mother — God bless her.”

When she died, he was nine, and he thought of it as his introduction to “the back side of this world.”

“In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it,” he wrote.

He told the woman that she would feel better again, and said he knew that because he had enough experience with death to know:

“The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before…”

Source: Shapell.org, the website of the  Shapell Manuscript Foundation

Artist Carl Bersch was out on his Tenth Street balcony sketching the end-of-the-war celebrations when, shortly after 10 p.m., a loud cry came from Ford’s Theatre: “President Lincoln has been shot. Clear the street.”

From the balcony about 12-14 feet above the street, Bersch sketched as a group of men carried the president across the street on an improvised stretcher.

His “Borne by Loving Hands” depicts the men stopping at the curb to debate the best place to take the president.

Bersch later wrote that he saw a young man standing on the topmost step of Petersen’s Boardinghouse beckoning the president’s bearers. That man was Henry Safford, a mustachioed 17-year-old War Department clerk. Tuckered out after five nights of revelry, Safford had decided to stay in and read on the clammy, cloudy Friday night.  Hearing the commotion across the street from his second-story room in the front of the house, he went downstairs to help.

Source: “A. Lincoln, His Last 24 Hours” by W. Emerson Reck

John Wilkes Booth was born on this day in 1838, but it was a special date in the Booth household for another reason, too. It was the day Junius Booth and Mary Ann Holmes Booth were married — on John Wilkes’ 13th birthday.

Junius would have married Mary Ann sooner, but he couldn’t.

He had a wife and toddler back in London.

Junius was a top Shakespearean actor in London when he fell for Mary Ann, a flower girl who sold her wares outside Coventry Garden. They eloped to America.

The first Mrs. Booth first learned that her husband had 10 American children when her son grew old enough to sail to America and connect with his dad.

Junius and Mary Ann had shown their American-born children a fake marriage certificate, and they were hoping the issue would never come up.

When Adelaide Delannoy Booth discovered the truth, she came to American and tracked Mary Ann Booth around Baltimore, screaming invectives about her and her illegitimate children.

During those years, John Wilkes reportedly changed from a lovable, friendly boy to a mean bully, who even beat up his younger brother.

Adelaide eventually divorced Junius, leaving him free to marry Mary Ann in 1851. Within a year, Junius contracted a disease on a riverboat, died, and left his new bride a widow.

Mary Ann Holmes Booth

Junius Brutus Booth