BRICK DUST DISASTER
ON FRIDAY, JUNE 9, 1893, HUNDREDS OF RECORDS AND PENSION Division clerks, some of them Civil War veterans, filed into their jury-rigged offices in the old Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Many considered the three-story building dangerously unsafe, a firetrap in “tumble-down” condition. Others believed the one-time Baptist Church on 10th Street was cursed: In 1862, it was destroyed in a fire; three years later, President Abraham Lincoln was murdered in an unguarded balcony box there, his horrified wife by his side.
If the clerks read the front page of the morning newspaper, they found plenty of fodder for discussion among themselves. In New Bedford, Mass., the sensational murder trial of Lizzie Borden, accused of hacking her parents to death with an ax, was in full swing. Numerous women attended the trial, leading a reporter to grumble, “housework must be neglected.” And, in the same state, the 59-year-old brother of the century’s most notorious villain was buried in Cambridge. Renowned tragedian Edwin Booth, an obituary noted, was “extremely sensitive” regarding the “insane act” committed at Ford’s Theatre by his younger sibling, Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.
Paper-pushing government clerks weren’t the only busy workers in Ford’s Theatre. Under the direction of Colonel Fred C. Ainsworth, head of the Records and Pensions Division of the War Department, construction workers were installing an electric-light plant, work that necessitated digging into brick supports in the basement. Several days earlier, clerks had complained about the construction, noting it “imperiled the lives of every man who worked in the building.”
Despite the dangerous work conditions, men went about their tasks in the damp, dark, rickety theater-turned-office
