![]() ![]() He chose to put his faith in a 27 year-old violinst and Union veteran, William “Billy” Withers, Jr. Ford was then tasked with finding a new orchestra leader for his new theater. during the process of rebuilding that followed, when the new theatrical season opened in the fall of 1863, Fenelon took a job as the orchestra leader of the recently opened New York Theatre in NYC. Consumed in the fire was a bulk of the orchestra’s instruments and music. The loss was a hefty one for John Ford at about $20,000. Fenelon remained as Ford’s orchestra director until a fire struck Ford’s Atheneum in December of 1862. In this capacity, Fenelon recruited local D.C. As director, Fenelon not only conducted the orchestra on a nightly basis, but was also tasked with the duty of recruiting and hiring musicians to ensure that Ford would have an ample sized band each night. Ford first remodeled the Tenth Street Baptist Church and opened it up as Ford’s Atheneum, he hired a musician named Eugene Fenelon to be his orchestra director. Judge the evidence for yourself as we explore the boys in the band. I’ve placed them in an order that arranges them from more likely to have been at Ford’s to less likely to have been at Ford’s. Schnieder – possibly violin or trumpetīelow you will find little biographies of each man and the evidence we have about their presence at Ford’s Theatre. With that being said, what follows is the list of the possible Ford’s Theatre orchestra members on April 14, 1865: Every name must be taken with a grain of salt and, aside from William Withers, we cannot guarantee that any of these men were actually present. The evidence supporting their attendance is, overall, extremely weak and varies greatly from man to man. Over the past week, with the assistance of fellow researcher Rich Smyth, I have assembled a partial list of those who were said to have been in the orchestra the night Lincoln was killed. Ford and even he could not come up with the names of any members of the orchestra aside from its director. When John Ford Sollers was writing his dissertation about his grandfather, he had access to documents that had belonged to John T. The big challenge when it comes to determining the identities of the orchestra members at Ford’s Theatre, is that we lack any sort of list from the period. ![]() But how much do we really know about the musicians who played that fateful night? We know that President’s Lincoln’s party, arriving late to the theater, was greeted by that orchestra. We know that Ford’s Theatre had an orchestra. Theaters were houses of entertainment and an orchestra was part of what you paid for when you bought your ticket. Even during non-musical performances (like the comedic play Our American Cousin) an overture and entr’acte music were expected by audiences. Music was a crucial part of the theater experience in the Civil War era. “Unless further information has been found, we do not know the names or even the number of the orchestra” The footnote attached to it admitted that: This blind spot was even acknowledged by Sollers in his day, forcing him to add a footnote after the word “usher” in the quote above. However, despite the wealth of information historians have discovered, we still have one blind spot in our knowledge of the inner workings of the theater that night. While Sollers’ claim wasn’t quite true when he wrote it in 1962, thanks to modern scholarship, we now really do know a lot about the actors and stagehands of Ford’s Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination. This quote comes from the doctoral dissertation of John Ford Sollers, the grandson of Ford’s Theatre owner, John T. We know the names, habits, and duties of every actor, stagehand, ticket-taker, box-office man, and usher*, and we know who many of the audience were.” “More is probably known about the people who were at work in Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865, and about the topography of the theatre itself than of any other house in the world. ![]()
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