At 10:30 PM on March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln arrived here tired and gaunt with his wife Mary for the ball celebrating his second inaugural, held in the Grand Hall on the top floor of the Patent Office, now a Smithsonian museum. The occasion was bittersweet: Union victory was in sight, but the war's ravages weighed heavily on Lincoln and showed in his weary face, and because he was never one for social occasions, he left before the midnight supper. Six weeks later he was dead, killed by an assassin's bullet at Ford's Theatre two blocks away. Lincoln would have passed this way often, for the Patent Office and the General Post Office Building across F Street were among the most important federal buildings erected after the White House and the Capitol. Both were designed in part by Robert Mills, architect of the Washington Monument and the U.S. Treasury, and both were partially complete when Lincoln came to Washington as a one-term congressman from Illinois in 1848. They rose above the surrounding two- and three-story shops and houses, and in a small building beside the Post Office, Samuel F.B. Morse operated the nation's first telegraph office. During the Civil War, the street was a place of intense activity: the Post Office also served as a food commissary, the Patent Office had been a hospital, and Walt Whitman, who cared for the wounded there, witnessed and recorded the stark contrast between festive celebration and wartime suffering.
