Today, tourists walking down H Street NW in D.C.'s Chinatown mostly smell soy sauce and scallions. They pass 604 H Street. But in 1865, this three-story brick townhouse housed a deadly conspiracy. Mary Surratt ran it. As a struggling Confederate-sympathizing widow, she desperately needed the rent money. Her son John brought home some very dangerous friends. Booth arrived. John Wilkes Booth paced the floorboards here, whispering about kidnapping and eventually murder. He recruited co-conspirators like Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt right in Mary's parlor.
Hours after Booth shot Lincoln, federal investigators raided the home. They arrested Mary. They also found a hidden photograph of Booth behind a picture frame. Did she know The prosecutors certainly thought so, arguing she actively abetted the plot. That very morning, she had delivered binoculars and gun cartridges to her tavern in Surrattsville for Booth's escape route. She claimed innocence. The military commission did not buy her story. On July 7, 1865, she walked to the gallows in the hot sun of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary. The trapdoor dropped. She was the first woman executed by the United States federal government.
The house survived. Most Civil War landmarks in downtown D.C. fell to the wrecking ball long ago, but this one clung to life. It morphed over the decades. It served as a grocery, a pharmacy, and eventually, a Chinese restaurant. Patrons eat sushi now. They sit right where Booth planned his escape. A small bronze plaque on the brick exterior offers the only hint of the home's bloody association. The National Register added the site in 2004. It stands as a bizarre monument to a nation's darkest hour.
