The Lincoln Traveler

[ReignetteC]

"Another 'small' fact is that most writers assumed that Booth, in his escape from the alley behind Ford's Theatre, spurred his mare up the alley to F Street, and turned right. It did not occur to me to question this until I learned, in an old document, that a wooden gate, used as a billboard, closed the F Street exit and that the assassin would have had to ride up the alley, halt, dismount, open the gate, and then flee. In Ford's Theatre, a National Parks guard told me that the alley, in 1865, formed a T, and that John Wilkes Booth was aware of the gate at F Street and had not used it, turning instead down the other leg of the alley to Ninth Street, and thence right to Pennsylvania Avenue. In the library at the back of Ford's Theatre, this guard had an old government pamphlet which proved the point." - Jim Bishop, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, 3.