Owned and operated by the ardently pro-Southern Surratt family, this building served Confederate agents as a safe house during the Civil War. Built in 1852, it functioned as a tavern, hostelry, and post office. John Surratt, Jr., a Confederate courier, came into contact with actor John Wilkes Booth in the fall of 1864, when Booth planned to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln and Surratt was to help convey Lincoln to Richmond. The tavern was intended to serve as a way-station during the kidnapping, and weapons and supplies were hidden there. In December 1864, Mary E. Surratt rented out the tavern and moved to her other home on H Street in Washington, where Booth visited often and two of his conspirators briefly boarded with her. The kidnapping plot eventually became an assassination plot, and after Booth shot the president on April 14, 1865, he and David A. Herold came directly there to retrieve the weapons the conspirators had stashed earlier. They arrived at midnight and then headed south toward the hamlet of T.B. Mary E. Surratt's tenant there later gave testimony that sent her to the gallows on July 7, 1865, making her the first woman executed by the federal government. Her son fled to Canada, later returned, was tried and acquitted, and moved to Baltimore.