Mr. Lincoln's Ride georgia ave–petworth metro station
It’s the summer of 1862. Early morning, but already hot and dusty. You’re standing at this spot, when you see a tall man on horseback. It’s President Abraham Lincoln. You’re pleased to see him, but not surprised. After all, he rides by here often. Georgia Avenue, then the Seventh Street Turnpike, ran between downtown Washington and Rock Creek Church Road, which led to Lincoln’s summer cottage on the grounds of the Old Soldiers’ Home (now the Armed Forces Retirement Home). Though Lincoln generally traveled with military escorts, sometimes he sneaked out before dawn or after dark to journey in solitude. During the Civil War (1861-1865), Lincoln occasionally stopped to visit with formerly enslaved men and women or wounded soldiers at settlements and Army camps along his route. Harewood Hospital, once located near today’s Washington Hospital Center, was one of these. In March 1865 southern radical John Wilkes Booth heard that the president would attend a play at Campbell Hospital, then located at Sixth and Florida. Booth plotted unsuccessfully to kidnap Lincoln on his way back to the cottage. But a mere month later, he had his way, assassinating the president at Ford’s Theatre. For 83 years Engine Company 24, DC’s first fully motorized firefighting unit, occupied the south end of this block. Though the facility closed in 1994, its handsome façade survives on the Metro cooling plant on New Hampshire Avenue just south of here. The Green line opened here in 1999.
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