At 10:30 p.m. on March 4, 1865, a tired and gaunt President Lincoln arrived here with his wife Mary for the ball celebrating his second inaugural, held in the Grand Hall on the top floor of the Patent Office, today a Smithsonian Museum. The occasion was bittersweet: Union victory was in sight, but the ravages of war weighed heavily on him and showed in his weary, weathered face, and he left before the midnight supper. Six weeks later he was 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 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 homes. In a small building next to the Post Office, Samuel B. Morse operated the nation’s first telegraph office. During the Civil War, this street was a place of intense activity: the Post Office also served as a food commissary, and the Patent Office, later the site of the inaugural ball, had been a hospital where Walt Whitman nursed the wounded and witnessed the stark contrast between wartime suffering and the evening’s beauty.
