The Farmhouse As An Evidence Room

On April 26, 1865—before the wagon bearing Booth’s corpse had cleared the tree line—the first officers were already treating the Garrett farm as federal property. Where that body had passed, a different occupation took hold: one that would outlast even the manhunt and leave marks on the family they would still be repairing years later. Lieutenant Edward Doherty—his cavalry detachment having ridden forty miles across Virginia countryside to corner the assassin—looked on as Colonel Everton Conger took command of the scene as though he had run the pursuit from its beginning. Between them stood Sergeant Boston Corbett, still carrying at his side the weapon that killed Booth and answering to no clear authority; every officer there understood credit was being handed out in real time.

The barn still smoldered. Thin columns of smoke rose from the collapsed roof and drifted across the yard, carrying the smell of burnt tobacco and seasoned oak. Soldiers who had stood in firing positions an hour before now wandered with the loose gait of men whose immediate purpose had dissolved. Some approached the building to examine the gap in the boards where Corbett’s bullet had passed, or to locate the spot on the floor where Booth had fallen. Their curiosity was practical, not sentimental: they were learning what a crime scene looked like before they had orders to treat it as one.

Those orders arrived with Colonel Conger’s first instructions. He directed that the premises be secured, that nothing be moved without his authorization, that witnesses be separated and held for questioning. The vocabulary was military and legal at once, asserting a jurisdiction that had not existed when the Garretts went to bed the previous night. Richard Garrett, standing on his porch with his sons William and Jack, heard these commands applied to his own property with the same detachment he might have observed in a stranger’s field. The farm had become evidence. His family had become witnesses at best, material witnesses at worst.

The physical collection began within the hour. A cavalry sergeant detailed to secure the premises started with the barn floor itself. The planks where Booth had lain—where his body had rested while a local doctor confirmed the spinal wound and Colonel Conger searched his pockets—bore dark stains that the sergeant recognized as having potential value. He borrowed a crowbar from the Garretts’ tool shed and began prying up boards. The wood was old, fastened with hand-wrought nails that squealed in protest. He worked methodically, stacking the stained planks near the barn door, and when he had enough to suggest the dimensions of a death scene, he stopped. The rest of the floor remained intact, an ordinary barn floor again, except for the scorch marks and the smell.

This was improvisation responding to no established protocol. The War Department had never managed the aftermath of a presidential assassination. The procedures invented at the Garrett farm—removing physical sections of a structure to preserve the geometry of death, interrogating witnesses on site before their memories could be influenced by news or counsel, dividing custody of evidence between competing authorities—would shape federal practice without ever being formally codified. What the sergeant did by instinct, others would later do by regulation.

The Garrett family watched from the porch. Richard Garrett, sixty-two years old, had rented rooms to strangers he later learned to fear. He had refused them the house on the night of April 25, forcing them into the barn where they were found, and had paid for this refusal with a night of terror—soldiers breaking down doors, weapons discharged in his yard, his property set alight. Now he faced interrogation on his own land, conducted by the same men who had destroyed his outbuilding. His sons stood with him in a rough line that suggested both solidarity and exposure. William, the elder, had carried food to the strangers and observed them at closer range. Jack, the younger, had led the soldiers to the barn and then been shoved aside while they completed their work.

Colonel Conger took the lead. His method was direct: he separated the Garretts and questioned them in sequence, allowing each man’s answers to inform the pressure he applied to the next. Richard Garrett went first. The old farmer’s initial statement, given while his barn still smoldered, was a jumble of dates and second guesses. He placed Booth’s arrival on the wrong day, confused Herold’s comings and goings, and could not say with certainty whether the stranger had introduced himself as “Booth” or “Boyd” or something else entirely. Conger did not correct him. The detective wrote down what he heard, or had a subordinate write it, and moved on to William.

The elder son proved more precise, perhaps because he had been the one to observe the fugitives directly. He described Booth’s physical condition—the splinted leg, the crutch, the difficulty mounting stairs—and noted the theatrical manner that persisted even in hiding. But when Conger pressed him on what had been said, what promises or threats exchanged, William Garrett’s memory clouded. He had been afraid, he admitted. The man with the crutch had carried a carbine, and his companion had made sure they knew it.

Jack Garrett gave the most agitated account. His voice carried the particular anger of a young man who has been used and then dismissed. He insisted that he had tried to warn his father against the strangers, that he had recognized something wrong in their manner from the first. Conger listened with the patience of a man collecting variations rather than seeking truth. Jack’s statement would matter later, when the conspiracy trial required witnesses who could establish the fugitives’ movements and state of mind. For now, it was simply another document in the making, raw material for the case being assembled in Washington.

The physical evidence followed parallel paths that would not fully converge. Colonel Conger claimed custody of Booth’s personal effects: the diary, the photographs, the letters, the weapons. These he packed in a leather case that had belonged to the deceased, creating a portable archive that would travel with him back to the capital. Lieutenant Doherty, meanwhile, secured the military paraphernalia—the carbines, the ammunition, the horse tack—that established the fugitives’ means of flight. The sergeant’s blood-stained planks remained in a pile near the barn, their significance clear but their chain of custody uncertain.

This division was not accidental. It reflected the dual nature of the pursuit that had ended here: part military operation, part detective work, with no clear precedence between the two. Doherty commanded the cavalry detachment that had done the riding, the searching, the final cornering. Conger had directed the approach, made the decision to fire the barn, and been first to examine the fallen man. Both had legitimate claims to the evidence. Neither had authority to override the other.

Into this divided possession came Lafayette Baker’s agents. The detective chief who had directed the broader manhunt from Washington had men in the field who reached the Garrett farm by afternoon, bearing credentials that asserted priority over local military command. What they found was a scene already picked over, with the most valuable items spoken for and the witnesses exhausted by repeated questioning. Baker’s men worked anyway, collecting secondary artifacts—the blankets Booth had used, the remains of his meals, the position of furniture in the rooms where he had rested—and compiling their own record of the capture.

The contradictions began immediately. Conger’s report, drafted that evening for transmission to Secretary Stanton, emphasized the detective’s own initiative in locating the fugitives and the necessity of firing the barn. Baker’s preliminary telegraph, sent through different channels, suggested a more collaborative operation in which his intelligence network had provided the essential leads. Both versions contained truths and omissions, and both would enter the official record before either could be checked against the other. The War Department, receiving multiple accounts of the same event, had no mechanism for reconciliation except the slow accumulation of testimony that would follow.

David Herold, the captive who had surrendered in the barn’s doorway while Booth remained inside, presented a different evidentiary problem.

The young pharmacist’s assistant, born June 16, 1842, sat under guard in the Garretts’ kitchen, having been denied the death he had apparently contemplated when he asked his captors to shoot him. After the shooting at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, Herold had accompanied Booth to the home of Samuel Mudd, the physician who would later be accused of conspiring to assassinate Lincoln. Herold alone could connect Booth to the full conspiracy, name the participants in Washington, explain the escape route through Maryland.

But his interrogation at the farm was cursory, limited by the absence of senior officers with authority to negotiate. Colonel Conger questioned him briefly, established his identity and his connection to the assassination, and then focused on securing him for transport.

The detailed confession that would implicate Dr. Mudd, George Atzerodt, and the others would come later, in Washington, under conditions that would raise their own questions about coercion and credibility.

The farmhouse itself became an object of attention as the day wore on. Soldiers searched the rooms where Booth and Herold had slept, turning up little that Conger had not already taken. They confiscated the Garretts’ own papers—deeds, correspondence, account books—on the theory that any document might prove relevant. Richard Garrett protested this as unnecessary, even cruel: his family had suffered enough without having their private affairs exposed to military scrutiny. The protest was noted and ignored. The farm was now federal territory, and the family who owned it were witnesses at best, suspects at worst.

By evening, the first telegrams had reached Washington. Stanton, working from his office in the War Department, received Conger’s initial report and Baker’s competing version within hours of each other. The Secretary’s response, preserved in the files, directed immediate securing of all evidence and prisoners for transport to the capital. He named no preferred custodian, perhaps because he understood that the rivalry between his detective chief and the cavalry command would require his personal intervention. The Garrett farm, for all its distance from the centers of power, had become an extension of Stanton’s own office—a place where his authority was exercised through competing deputies whose conflicts he would later have to adjudicate.

Night brought no rest to the farm. The soldiers bivouacked in the yard and outbuildings, guarding prisoners and evidence alike. The Garretts retreated to their damaged house, where they could hear the mutter of sentries and the occasional challenge of passwords. Jack Garrett later testified that he did not sleep, that he sat in the dark listening to the destruction of his family’s livelihood being catalogued as federal property. His father, more pragmatic or more exhausted, did sleep, and would give a slightly different account of the same hours when questioned again in Washington.

The morning of April 27 brought new arrivals. A medical officer, dispatched from Belle Plain to conduct a formal autopsy, found that Booth’s body had already departed. He examined instead the site of death, the blood-stained planks, and the medical debris left by the examination conducted hours before. His report, filed with the Judge Advocate General, would become part of the official record without ever quite matching the descriptions given by those who had actually witnessed the death. The distance between the farm and the capital—twelve hours by steamer, longer by overland route—allowed these discrepancies to persist, each version hardening into fact before comparison was possible.

The evidence crates began to accumulate on the Garretts’ porch. Colonel Conger had requisitioned packing materials from the nearest military depot, and soldiers now wrapped weapons in oilcloth, nested documents in boxes, and labeled everything with the date and location of seizure. The system was improvised, responding to no established protocol for presidential assassinations. Stanton’s War Department had never faced this particular problem, and the solutions invented at the Garrett farm would shape federal practice for decades to come.

David Herold watched this process from his guarded position in the kitchen. He had been allowed to wash, to change into clothes provided by his captors, to eat a meal that the Garretts were compelled to prepare. These small comforts marked him as a prisoner of value, someone to be preserved for future use. He would later claim that he was promised immunity in exchange for cooperation, though no document from the farm supports this. What is certain is that he observed the transformation of the scene around him—the farm becoming a warehouse, his own capture becoming a bureaucratic event—and understood that his role in it was not yet determined.

The competing claims to evidence reached their first crisis over Booth’s diary. Colonel Conger had taken this from the body himself, reading entries by lamplight while Booth still lay breathing on the barn floor. The small leather-bound book contained dates, names, observations from the twelve days of flight—material that would prove essential to understanding the conspiracy and devastating to those it named. Conger kept it in his personal custody through the return to Washington, delivering it finally to Stanton’s desk. But Baker’s agents reported, in their own telegrams, that they had been prevented from examining this crucial document at the scene, and Baker himself would later suggest that pages had been removed before the diary reached official channels. The accusation was never proved, but it persisted, adding a further layer of uncertainty to evidence that was already contested.

The Garretts’ interrogations continued through the second day. Colonel Conger, preparing to depart with his prisoners, conducted final interviews that pressed for admissions of complicity. Richard Garrett held to his story of ignorance: he had rented to strangers, he had asked no questions, he had learned the truth only when soldiers arrived. His sons gave slightly more qualified accounts, acknowledging suspicions they had not acted upon. None of this amounted to evidence of conspiracy, but all of it would be recalled when the military commission considered whether to indict Mary Surratt’s boarders and suppliers.

The physical transformation of the farm accelerated. In addition to the blood-stained planks, soldiers now removed sections of the barn wall where bullet holes marked Corbett’s shot and Booth’s possible return fire. They measured distances, sketched positions, created a paper record of a three-dimensional event that would be flattened into diagrams for the trial. The Garretts’ furniture—chairs, tables, bedsteads—was examined for concealed compartments, then either confiscated as potential evidence or left in disarray. The house that had been a family’s home became, temporarily, an extension of the War Department’s filing system.

Lieutenant Doherty, whose cavalry had done the essential work of pursuit and capture, found himself increasingly marginalized in this process. His reports emphasize the exhaustion of his men, the difficulty of the terrain, the precision of their final approach—all details that mattered for military record but counted for little in the competition for credit. When he finally departed with the prisoner Herold and the bulk of the physical evidence, he traveled under Conger’s overall command, his own contribution noted in subordinate clauses.

The last day at the farm, April 28, brought the final inventory. A quartermaster officer, arriving from Washington with standardized forms, attempted to impose order on the accumulated materials. He listed weapons by type and serial number, described documents by their first lines, assigned each item a reference number that would track it through the coming proceedings. This systematization came too late to capture everything: some items had already disappeared into private possession, some witnesses had already left for Washington with stories that would not be formally recorded for weeks. The quartermaster did what he could, creating a ledger that would serve as the official record despite its acknowledged gaps.

Richard Garrett, in a final interview conducted on his own porch, made a statement that would be quoted against him at the conspiracy trial. Asked whether he would have sheltered Booth had he known his true identity, the old farmer answered that he could not say—he had been afraid, the stranger had been armed, his family was at risk. This honest uncertainty was transcribed as moral failure, evidence of rebel sympathies that might have aided the assassin. The transcription was accurate; the interpretation was not, but it would carry weight in a courtroom far removed from the circumstances that produced it.

The departure of the final military detachment, on the afternoon of April 28, left the Garrett farm in a condition that would persist for years. The barn remained half-burned, its missing planks and wall sections creating gaps that the family would patch with unmatching materials. The house bore the marks of systematic search—displaced floorboards, disturbed plaster, furniture arranged and rearranged by indifferent hands. The family itself carried the damage of interrogation, their statements recorded and circulated in versions they barely recognized.

What had been created in this process was not simply evidence but a particular kind of narrative: one in which the chaotic reality of Booth’s final hours was refined into a chain of documented facts that could be presented in court. The contradictions between Conger’s account and Baker’s, between the Garretts’ initial statements and their later testimony, between the physical evidence as collected and as inventoried—these were not resolved but incorporated, becoming part of the record’s texture. The military commission that would try the conspirators would receive this material as the foundation of its proceedings, never fully aware of how much had been shaped by the conditions of its collection.

The labeled evidence crates stood stacked on the porch, their contents inventoried in multiple competing versions, their chain of custody already disputed. The prisoners sat under guard, their immediate fates determined but their ultimate value still being calculated in Washington. The farm itself, emptied of both, would remain as it had been made: a place where a man died and a case began, the physical evidence of an event that would now be argued in rooms the Garrett family would never enter.