The Petersen House in 1907: Tourists Skipped Where Lincoln Died

Two days before what would have been Abraham Lincoln’s 98th birthday, the Washington Times ran a long feature complaining that tourists to the capital were ignoring the one address in town most directly tied to the slain president.

The date was February 10, 1907. The address was 516 Tenth Street NW, across the street from Ford’s Theatre. Today we call that building the Petersen House. In 1907 it was the home of Osborn H. Oldroyd and his collection of more than 3,000 Lincoln relics, and almost no one was walking through the door.

Here is how the Times opened the story.

LINCOLN is strangely forgotten by visitors to Washington.

The sightseers who flock to the National Capital at all seasons of the year, for some unknown reason seem to find more interesting the things of less historic importance than the relics pertaining to the first martyred President, whose untimely death was mourned by the entire civilized world.

That a stone fountain, a modern building, a plat of ground owned by some old resident, or a storehouse of Government belongings of no particular historic value should draw crowds while the throng indifferently passes by the house where died Lincoln, the inspiration of all patriots since his day, seems almost incredible. Yet such is the case.

While the trend of tens of thousands is wearing away the steps leading to the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Army and Navy Building, and other Government structures, but few persons stray into the modest three-story red brick house at 516 Tenth street northwest, in which Lincoln breathed his last on the night of April 14, 1865.

In this building, which would burn like tinder should fire break out in it, is gathered what is said to be the largest memorial collection ever brought together in behalf, not only of Lincoln, but of anyone human being. There are over 3,000 separate articles of Lincolniana, representing forty-seven years of untiring collection on the part of Osborn H. Oldroyd, the custodian.

This collection of rare mementoes is without price. Mr. Oldroyd never has set a value on it. Perhaps the most valuable parts of it are the thirteen pieces of furniture from the Lincoln homestead in Springfield, Ill.; an autograph letter wherein he grants a discharge to a member of his regiment which fought in the Black Hawk war, in 1832, and the family Bible, in which Lincoln wrote his name when he was but nine years old.

Mr. Oldroyd, himself a veteran of the civil war, having fought as a member of the Twentieth Ohio Regiment in thirteen different battles, began collecting Lincoln mementoes in 1860, when Lincoln was running for President. He has seventy badges, cartoon caricatures, and flags relating to the Lincoln campaign of that year. He has 1,000 books and 3,000 newspaper clippings relating to Lincoln; 27 busts, 171 political and memorial medals; 145 pictures illustrating the assassination and funeral of the President; 37 photographs of the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, showing his flight, capture, death, and burial; the spur worn b Booth which caught in the silk flag draped before the President’s box, in Ford’s Theater and the flag itself, and thousands of other memorial articles, large and small, including death and life masks, cartoons from London Punch, a rail split by Lincoln, and the family cradle wherein the Lincoln children were rocked.

The rooms in the memorial house, which was bought by the Government in 1887, are literally packed with Lincolniana. The very room in which the President died contains some of the most interesting portions of the collection.

Yet all these things do not appeal to the routist and the visitor as do the “rubber neck” wagons, the theaters, and other places of amusement.

Oldroyd had been collecting Lincolniana since 1860, when he was eighteen and Lincoln was running for the White House. After mustering out of the Twentieth Ohio in 1865 he kept gathering. In 1883 he moved his family and the entire collection into the Lincoln family home in Springfield, Illinois, opening it as a private museum.

When the state took the Springfield house over a decade later, Oldroyd packed everything onto a train and moved it east, into the federally owned Petersen House at 516 Tenth Street NW. He lived there as custodian until 1926, when Congress finally bought the collection for $50,000. He died four years after that.

Most of those 3,000 pieces are still in federal hands today, displayed in the museum under Ford’s Theatre across the street. The Petersen House itself is part of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site now, run by the National Park Service, and visitors do come in, by the hundreds of thousands every year. The Times reporter would be relieved.