Petersen House

About this audio guide

This guide to the Petersen House in Washington, D.C. follows the boardinghouse's owner, tailor William Petersen, and lodger Willie Clark, whose rented back-room bed became the place doctors laid a dying president after Ford's Theatre. You'll hear how Petersen's fury at the ruined room led him to throw a stained pillow out the window, and how relic hunters and a Chicago showman named Charles Gunther began circling the house's furnishings within decades. It also traces how a Lincoln-obsessed collector named Osborn Oldroyd later moved into the house itself and opened his own private museum in the death room.