“William A. and Anna Petersen lived across the street from Ford’s Theater in a plain red brick three-story and basement townhouse that Petersen constructed in 1849. William Petersen was a German immigrant tailor born in Hanover in 1810. His wife, Anna, was from Darmstadt. Julius Ulke, a German-American photographer, boarded there in the 1860’s and took the historic photograph showing the room a few minutes after President Lincoln’s body was removed from the bedroom where he died at 7:22 am on April 15, 1865. In 1878, a native Berliner, Louis Schade (1829–1903), another prominent “Forty-Eighter” who came to the United States in 1851, purchased the house at 516 Tenth Street NW from the Petersens’ heirs. He published The Washington Sentinel from his home.”
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