The Navy Yard Bridge carried 11th Street SE across the Anacostia River to Good Hope Road, and it was John Wilkes Booth's way out of Washington on the night he shot Abraham Lincoln, 14 April 1865. Booth reached the bridge before eleven, within about half an hour of leaving Ford's Theatre. The sentry, Sergeant Silas T. Cobb of the 3rd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, had not yet heard of the assassination. The bridge was supposed to be closed to traffic after nine at night, but Cobb let the rider pass once he gave his name, Booth, and said he was going home to Charles, which Cobb took to mean Charles County, and that he lived close to Beantown, today's Waldorf, Maryland.
A few minutes later David Herold, Booth's accomplice, rode up. Cobb brought him under the light of the guard house to see his face, heard that he had been delayed visiting a woman on Capitol Hill, and let him through as well. Herold had grown up a few blocks from the bridge, on Eighth Street SE, where his father was chief clerk of the naval storehouse at the Navy Yard. The two rode on into southern Maryland, and Booth was cornered and killed near Port Royal, Virginia, on 26 April. Cobb died in Michigan two years later, aged 29.
The bridge of about 1820 has been replaced several times. A bridge of 1905 to 1907 on the same crossing carried the troops who drove the Bonus Army out of its Anacostia camp in 1932, and the present 11th Street Bridges were built between 2009 and 2013.
Getting there
38.8715, -76.9902
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