The building at 604 H Street was closely connected to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, five blocks away. During the Civil War, Mary Surratt, a Maryland-born widow who was quietly sympathetic to the Confederacy, lived in this modest brick house and took in boarders. She had one son in the Confederate Army, and another, John Surratt, had become friends with the actor John Wilkes Booth, who had been plotting to capture President Lincoln before changing the plan to murder on April 14, 1865. Booth visited the house several times, and several co-conspirators, including John Surratt, lived there, though most likely no formal meeting ever took place there. After the assassination, President Andrew Johnson called the house "the nest in which the egg was hatched," reflecting a popular belief. Three days later, police came to see Mary Surratt, and when Louis Powell, already identified as part of the plot, arrived at the same time, the coincidence implicated her. She was arrested, tried, and hanged with three others at Fort McNair in Southwest Washington on July 7, 1865. Booth fled to a Virginia tobacco shed, where pursuers found and shot him to death, while John Surratt escaped to Canada and went free. More than a century later, Mary Surratt's guilt remained a subject of debate.
