President Lincoln’s Cottage

Definitely a must see when visiting Washington, D.C. Of Lincoln history. This is one of those spots that you will be so glad to see if off the beaten path on the history trail. Make reservations ahead of time small intimate groups are taken thru cottage.

Recently I have visited the Lincoln Cottage, it is located three miles north of The White House. Lincoln used to live here after fulfilling his presidential duties in the White House.
In order to get inside the place you are required to have a valid ticket along with your ID
, the ticket can be acquired in advance for a fee of $ 15. Once you have passed the entrance you will be booked with a tour guide who will guide you through he place and give you an interactive presentation with both PowerPoint and speakers. There aren’t a lot of places to sit and relax so expect to be always on the move. You are not allowed to take any photos inside the cottage but you are welcomed to take photos on the visitor’s center. The gift shop has a lot of interesting stuffs which I think will be great gifts for your loved ones. Overall, it was worth the $ 15.

For $ 15 you get a view of Lincoln’s cottage. He spent a good amount of time here during his presidency and we got a very extensive overview of how his life was during his time here.
The Lincoln cottage is located three miles north of the White House. Everyday Lincolnwood take the 30-​minute carriage ride to and from the White House where he did his presidential duties and would come back to the cottage for refuge in the evening time where he slept.
Unfortunately this cottage does not have federal funding and is fully held up by private donations. It’s located on the grounds Armed Forces Retirement Home which is on federal property. You are not able to wander the grounds without a guide and only within the specified areas of the tour.
You’re required to park on the street outside of the gate before entering the property. You must provide an ID and your ticket to validate your tour visit before making it to the visitor center where you check in with the tour guide. Tickets must be purchased in advanced.
As far as the cottage goes itself; you don’t find any rooms with furnishings in it during the Lincoln period. This is mainly due to its ever-​changing usage over the years since Lincoln’s presidency. What they do offer is an interactive exhibition with both PowerPoint and speakers and talks from the tour guide. They will ask you questions to see what you know of the Lincoln Administration and during anything during the time.
Photos are not allowed to be taken while on the tour of inside the cottage, however, they can be taken inside the visitors center and outside only.
What does it this was a firm investment? Absolutely! If you are a history lover and you want to see a different side of Lincoln’s life — you can find it here.

Fascinating tour with an amazing tour guide, Robert. He truly paints a picture of what was happening at Lincoln’s cottage back in the 1800s. You even get to see the room where President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. I highly recommend this tour.

What a great recommendation from our concierge! Travel Thru time and visit Lincoln’s summer cottage, and discover more tidbits about one of America’s most beloved presidents.
Make sure you call for reservations first though! We almost didn’t get to take the last tour of the day.
Our tour guide, Rob, was excellent! And quite the «Lincoln nut». Always a treat when you get a guide who is so knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.

This tour was amazing. You get to see Lincoln’s cottage, learn about his personal and professional history, and it’s just such a beautiful space. Our tour guide was very informative and great to listen to. She led the group very well. A lot of what was explained to us was hooked up to TV monitors and we watched short videos.
There aren’t a lot of places to sit and listen, so expect to be on your feet for most of the tour. (Also there are a lot of chairs, but they are for historical accuracies and display, nothing else.)
You have to grab your tickets in the gift shop, which is brilliant on their part. But the stuff they are selling is actually worth checking out. I want to go back there just to buy some gifts for friends soon. It’s a good selection of items and not at all overpriced.
Once you’ve been on the tour once, I feel like that is probably enough. But it is worth the trip outside of downtown DC for the tour.

Really great museum. But be prepared. This will not be your normal «looking at things» type of experience.
They celebrate the words and ideas of Lincoln rather than the furniture he sat on. It gave me a great perspective on early Washington, DC geography.
They have ample parking and I would suggest getting tickets in advance. They seem to sell out quickly and we went in a slow tourist season in DC (October).
I brought my parents who are in there 60’s and they really enjoyed it.

Learned a great deal about Lincoln’s time as president that I’d never heard of before. Robert Goffredi led a great tour. Highly recommend the tour!

This is a hidden gem of a museum in DC. It is not far from the city, we drove and there is parking. The campus on which the cottage sits is beautiful. This is a perfect tour for someone who thinks they’ve seen all the museums and tourist attractions in DC.
The cottage was beautifully restored. The tour is well done, they take advantage of technology to supplement the tour guide’s speech with reenactments over the speakers in the rooms. Our tour guide was lovely, she really knew and appreciated the history of the cottage and of Lincoln.
Highly recommend taking this tour!

The visit was informative and the tpur guide was very knowledgeable, well kept property. A definite stop in Washington DC.

I loved this visit. The cottage provides a new and interesting perspective, at least for us. It is undressed, with no staging which I liked. The tour guide was very good and not rushed. The tapes and monitors were in limited use and I think added to the experience. I have three boys, ages 13, 11 and 7 and it was appropriate for them as well. You can be where Lincoln was when making difficult decisions.

This is a very diff type of tour. The cottage does not have any original furnishings & is used for events and has some digital aids to provide assistance with significance of the residence. The exhibit center has summary of all the key items that are reviewed on the tour.

We really enjoyed the guided tour at President Lincoln’s cottage. I have lived in the DC area for over 8 years and was surprised that I had never heard of it until I saw it featured in a groupon. The museum and guided tour give you a glimpse into President Lincoln’s life and presidency that no other monument or museum in the area does. You will hear history through Lincoln’s words and come to see him as the great man and leader that he was rather than the larger than life legend history books portray him to be. We will definitely go back and bring visiting friends and family.

They are taking a different approach to historical interpretation with supplemental electronics, speakers, and tv screens. The furniture is scant and a little disappointing. The place focuses mostly on Lincoln and not any other inhabitants, which is fine for ‘Lincoln’s’ cottage but does the home some injustice.
The tour guide was friendly, but a little distracted and the tour was disjointed. I love historic tours, but sadly, I was bored on this one. Maybe, it’s the tour guide.
The majority of the tour was about Lincoln but I wish there was more history and information about the physical location and the house’s structure.
The place is very new and it has a bright future with great initiatives for DC. If you’re a member of the National Trust, you can get a discount on your ticket price which is helpful.
The supplemental museum is interesting. It’s gorgeous but I was disappointed.

I have never been treated so horribly in my life. The customer service was unhelpful and rude. I hate that it ruins such a nice tour but I would not recommend patronizing this place to anyone. No one deserves to be treated the way they treat people.

The cottage has only recently become a museum in the past few years, so much of the house itself is still bare bones with very little furniture and restoration underway. They make up for this by using multimedia videos and recordings to give visitors a sense of the issues and conversations Lincoln had while at the cottage. There is a very well done museum across the parking lot from the cottage which focuses on its use during the Civil War with exhibits and an introductory video, not too much on its early history and use after Lincoln (he was only one of four presidents to use the structure). There is also a gift shop with books and more information on Lincoln.
The tour takes about 45 – 60 minutes, so if you’re taking the last tour of the day be sure to show up at least 30 minutes early to allow yourself enough time to see the museum before touring the cottage. We arrived at our tour date and they were nice enough to let us see the video after our tour, but there was not enough time to look at the exhibits too.

If you’ve lived in the D.C. area for more than 5 years, as I have, you might be wondering why you haven’t heard of this place. It turns out it only opened for tours in 2008. This year on my birthday I had my Dad in town, who enjoys historical sites but has seen all the old standbys. When I saw the half-​price ticket offer through LivingSocial, that sealed the deal. We hopped a cab up to Lincoln’s Cottage (on a cold winter’s day I wouldn’t recommend walking from the metro) and were immediately impressed by the expansive, beautiful grounds (the snow-​covered scenery didn’t hurt).
As others have noted, this tour is different from your typical tour of a historic home. But, for someone who is easily overwhelmed with visual interest in a museum and too many items to read, I enjoyed this departure from the norm. We had a fantastic, knowledgeable tour guide who, cheesy as it sounds to say, really made Lincoln’s stories come to life, including everyday anecdotes that made you feel you got to know Lincoln a bit, not just as a U.S. President, but as a person.
Something about the imagery invoked by the tour — standing outside of Lincoln’s cottage and seeing the view he had every day of the cemetery just across the way — instills a powerful sense of the issues our country faced in the Civil War era.
There are chairs (that you can actually sit on!) in most of the rooms of the cottage tour. There’s a perk of not having much, if any, period furniture pieces ;)
I didn’t see a café, but the gift shop inside the Visitor Center has a few snack items.
Our cabbie had a little trouble identifying the place on the drive there. I found it helpful to instruct him to take Upshur St across until it dead ends at the grounds entrance. Lyft had no problem picking us up for the return trip (after answering a few questions at the entrance gate — thankfully just steps from the Visitor Center).
Bottom line: worth the trek to see it at least once!

I had read all these stellar reviews and I’m not sure what I expected…
I knew that there would be very little furniture… I was going for the history not the furniture so I wasn’t upset about this. However, the tour was slightly boring (and I’m a huge history buff) and not what I expected specially given all the amazing reviews. Perhaps I expected Abe Lincoln to jump out of bushes and surprise us but the whole tour seemed slightly anticlimactic. The grounds are gorgeous for sure… but our tour guide though a sweet and adorable 24 year old was just not brimming with information. Fun to do once and with a discount from living social.

With its location a bit off the beaten path (3 miles north of the Capitol), the Cottage is often overlooked as a tourist destination. Selfishly, I am glad it is – this is a great place to introduce to your visitors, a real hidden gem: This, after all, was the 19^th-​century equivalent to Camp David, a summer retreat of five US Presidents, including Lincoln during the Civil War. When Lincoln stayed here, war plans, drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the dramatic reelection campaign all occurred within these walls.
Access to the Cottage is available only through one-​hour guided tours, and, at $ 15 for adults and so many great free museums to choose from in DC, it may seem steep. Having visited the place, though, I felt good supporting it and its mission (the museum runs a number of free programs for local schools, for example). We always reserve tickets in advance online or, for tours on the same day, by phone:

Finding the Cottage is a bit tricky – do get the directions from the museum’s website:
The Cottage is located on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, the Army’s first national nursing home, still in operation. This location is meaningful: War was never too far from Lincoln here – he was surrounded by veterans and members of the military guard. As he sat in his Cottage library, the view outside was of the growing national cemetery: 5,000 Civil War soldiers were buried here between 1861 and 1864, until a larger cemetery was established over Robert E. Lee’s Arlington farm. The Lincolns saw 30 to 40 military funerals out of their Cottage windows every week (the cemetery is open to the public and is only minutes away from the Cottage).
As you arrive on the grounds, pick up your tickets at the Visitors’ Center across from the Cottage (the Cottage is impossible to miss – there is a lifesize statue of Lincoln and his horse in front of it: that’s how he commuted to the White House every day; to ensure that the dimensions of the statue are right, measurements were taken of Lincoln’s clothing). There are a number of interesting exhibits at the Visitors’ Center, and that’s where the tours begin.
No photography is allowed inside the Cottage, but there isn’t much to photograph: there is virtually no furniture. There are no records of exactly what the Lincolns brought with them when they stayed here. Instead of stuffing the place with period furniture, walls in each room were stripped to their Lincoln-​era appearance, and the story is driven by recollections of what occurred here – recordings of people’s memories of the conversations that took place there, of Lincoln’s own words, and impressions of people who met him at the Cottage. The experience of the Cottage is very different from what you get at other presidential homes like Mount Vernon or Monticello, but I found it even more moving, somehow. My favorite room is Lincoln’s library, where 23 layers of paint were removed to uncover the horizontal ghost lines of bookshelves that once held documents, law books, and Lincoln’s beloved tomes of Shakespearean plays. This spare décor is surprisingly impactful.
Here is what you may expect when visiting the Cottage and the US National Cemetery nearby:

Other Unilocalers overrated this experience. Maybe they went on a different tour than I did.
Here’s the scoop:
Location and Getting There: Lincoln’s Cabin is not located in Rock Creek Park as you might assume based on advertisements. Instead it’s located in the Columbia Heights/​Petworth area at the Armed Forces Retirement home. The website provides good driving directions and ample information about what address to enter into your GPS and what gate to avoid etc. Just be aware that you will be driving down 14^th street for a good while if you are coming from Virginia. Give yourself ample time to get there; it’s not as easy to navigate as you might think. Here’s a link to the directions:
Parking: Look online to get an idea of what the cottage looks like prior to arrival. Once in the gate, follow the signs and then keep driving once the signage ends. You will pass the cottage on your right (this is where it comes in handy to know what the cottage looks like). A free parking lot is located behind the cottage.
Tickets: Book online early. Tickets sell out a couple of weeks in advance for weekend tours. BTW, no one really checked our tickets. I could have easily jumped onto a tour without paying. They should be better about this. I heard others complaining about it as well.
Meeting Spot: The meeting spot for the tour is at the information center, not the cottage. The information center is located adjacent to the cottage across the road. None of the paperwork indicated this. I was roaming around the cottage during a reenactment and almost busted through a singing performance taking place on the front steps in order to get to the front doors of the cottage for the tour. Granted, there are no doors on the front of the house (confusing) so that would have been fruitless and embarrassing. I had to chase down a tour guide who was coming out of the cottage to find out where to go. I am downplaying the extent to which I had to hustle to find the tour. None of the vendors or re-​enactors knew where to guide me. There didn’t appear to be many knowledgeable people on the grounds. You’re basically on your own. So yeah, go to the information center!
Late Arrivals: The tour started 10 minutes after the advertised time. My friend was running late and once I was inside the building, I realized my friend would never figure out how to enter the cottage. The entrance to the cottage is on the backside of the building through a large brown door that does not even look like a working door. The guide locks the door after the group enters the building. I propped the door and had to run out and find my friend in the parking lot. On my way out the re-​enactors had set up camp in front of the door and were taking old-​time photos which were definitely photo bombed multiple times by two modern day girls in yoga clothes.
Tour Quality: The cottage was not well preserved. Over the years it served as a dorm and there was a bathroom built where the fire place used to be etc. All of the original furniture disappeared over the hundred year span before this cottage was used for tours. So basically you will see the structure (the outside was renovated to match old photographs), but the interior does not have much going on. The tour is mostly a history lesson and not so much about the cottage or what went on inside the cottage. The guide used videos displayed on flat screen TVs and overhead speakers to help convey information. Our guide, Calvin, did a fine job but had an annoying tick — he slapped his pants pocket that was filled with keys over and over again. The most interesting part of the tour was the people watching experience. Man, there were some strange people on our tour.
End of tour: The tour ended at the information center and we were each given a commemorative bookmark for which my normally dog-​eared library books will be grateful! There are restrooms located in the information center. There were no soap or paper towels in the restrooms during our visit.
This tour was okay and could be a nice way to spend an afternoon so long as you are aware of what you will be getting and if you are willing to navigate the Petworth area.