Exhibitions

Lincoln's Carriage

March 23, 2015 – May 25, 2015
Image courtesy of the Studebaker National Museum, South Bend, Indiana

National Museum of American History
1300 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC

1st Floor, Center

See on Map Floor Plan

A special display of the carriage that transported the President, Mary Todd Lincoln, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865; on loan from the Studebaker National Museum.

The open barouche model carriage was built by Wood Brothers in 1864 and presented to Lincoln by a group of New York merchants shortly before the president’s second inauguration. Clement Studebaker bought the vehicle from F. B. Brewer of New York, who had acquired it from Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, who sold it shortly after his father's murder.

The carriage is on view in conjunction with Ford’s Theatre’s hallmark exhibition Silent Witnesses: Artifacts of the Lincoln Assassination, displaying a collection of items that were in the Theatre or carried by Abraham Lincoln the night of his assassination.