“My God! What is this?”

On the morning of July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield entered the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station in Washington, DC while leaving for his college reunion, and Charles Guiteau, a mentally ill office seeker aligned with a rival faction of Garfield's own Republican Party, fired two shots, striking him in the arm and back. Garfield cried out, "My God, what is this?" and collapsed on the station floor. For more than two months, Americans watched their president suffer from his wounds and poor medical care before he was moved from the summer heat of the White House to the seaside town of Elberon, New Jersey, where he died on September 19, 1881. The imposing Victorian Gothic station at Sixth and B Streets, NW, had opened in 1873, was widely considered an eyesore because trains belched smoke along tracks crossing the Mall, and was torn down in 1908 after Union Station made it obsolete.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States