On the Trail of an Assassin

Historic Rich Hill, the Maryland farmhouse where a Confederate sympathizer helped Lincoln's assassin, is open to visitors for the first time in 161 years — and it completes a 66-mile driving route that starts a half-hour from Alexandria.

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Lifestyle

For 161 years, one stop on John Wilkes Booth's escape route was closed to the public. This year, that changed.

Historic Rich Hill, the Bel Alton, Maryland, farmhouse where Confederate sympathizer Col. Samuel Cox sheltered the fleeing assassin, opened for public tours after a long restoration, with a grand opening ceremony in June. It is now the oldest house in Charles County open to visitors, and it fills a last major gap in a driving route that has drawn history-mystery buffs for decades.

The route is closer to Old Town than most Alexandrians realize. Ford's Theatre, where the story begins, is a half-hour drive. The Surratt’s Tavern stop in Maryland is roughly the same. The Mudd farm is about an hour out, Rich Hill a little more, and Port Royal — where the 12-day chase ended — sits about an hour and a quarter south on Route 301. The whole route runs 66 miles as Booth traveled it, and it makes a full day or a comfortable weekend.

Fall is the season for it. Nearly every stop involves walking outdoors, and the swamp stretch is considerably more pleasant in October than in July.

Across the Potomac in the wee hours of April 15, 1865, two men on horseback crossed the Navy Yard drawbridge and galloped south into Maryland. They were Booth, an actor who had shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre at 10:15 the previous night, and his accomplice, David Herold.

Union troops launched what was then called the greatest manhunt in history. Twelve days and 66 miles later, it ended at a burning tobacco barn in Caroline County, Virginia. Though Maryland never seceded, the countryside the two men rode through was full of Confederate sympathizers, and they found help at nearly every door.

Ford's Theatre

That April 14 was Good Friday. Lincoln and his wife, Mary, were watching "Our American Cousin" from a balcony box. Booth knew the theater's layout from performing there and reached the president's box unchallenged, recognized by employees. He waited for a laugh line, then fired a single shot from a pocket-sized Derringer into the back of Lincoln's head.

He leapt from the box to the stage, catching his spur on the way down and breaking his left fibula, and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" — “thus ever to tyrants.” Injured, he went out a back door into the alley and mounted a bay mare he had described as able to move like a cat.

The theater today looks much as it did that night, and National Park Service rangers tell the story. The museum holds Booth's Derringer, the boot Dr. Samuel Mudd cut off his leg hours later, and a replica of Lincoln's coat.

Across the street is the Petersen House, then a boarding house, where doctors carried the president and an overnight vigil began. At 7:22 the next morning, a doctor announced that Lincoln had died. Exhibits there follow the manhunt and the funeral train back to Springfield, Illinois.

Surratt Tavern

The pair’s first stop was Surratt's Tavern, 13 miles south in what is now Clinton, Maryland — a known safe house for Confederate couriers, where Booth's co-conspirators had stashed supplies.

The two men stayed seven minutes. Booth never dismounted. He took a shot of liquor while Herold went in for rifles, field glasses and whiskey. Booth couldn't manage a carbine with a broken leg, so tavern keeper John Lloyd hid it inside an upstairs wall.

Visitors can see the shaft where Lloyd concealed the gun and tour the eight-room tavern-ordinary, restored to the 1860s. An ordinary, in the language of the day, was a combined tavern, hotel and post office. The site's interpretation covers tavern life and slavery in Maryland.

The Mudd Farm

Around 4 in the morning on April 15, Booth and Herold knocked on the door of a two-story frame farmhouse near Bryantown. Dr. Samuel Mudd let them in. The two men had met before, and Booth said nothing about the night's work.

Mudd, 31, cut off Booth's boot, splinted the broken bone and put them in an upstairs bed. Union cavalry combed southern Maryland while they slept.

The house and 10 surrounding acres are presented as they were in 1860, when St. Catharine was a 281-acre tobacco, corn and wheat farm worked by enslaved people. Roughly 90 percent of the furnishings are original to the family's occupancy between 1859 and 1911. Everyone ends up on the second floor, in the room where Booth slept, looking at the bed.

Mudd's original medical tools are in his home office. Union soldiers later held his wife, four children and a house servant under arrest here.

Mudd was convicted of conspiracy later that year and imprisoned for four years at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, where he worked in the carpenter's shop. Two shell-covered jewelry boxes, a cane and a table he made there are in the house today. President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869. He returned to the farm and died in 1883, and his grave at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Bryantown still draws visitors.

The swamp and the thicket

On the evening of April 15, word reached Mudd that federal troops were closing in, and he sent the two men on. They rode into Zekiah Swamp, boggy and malarial — a journalist of the day wrote that no human being inhabited its extent. Today it is the Zekiah Swamp Natural Environment Area near Brandywine, 21 miles long and half a mile wide.

By April 16 they had reached Rich Hill and Samuel Cox, who sent them a quarter mile down the road to hide in a pine thicket. Whether they ever set foot inside the house is still disputed by historians.

They stayed in that thicket four nights and five days. Thomas Jones, a Confederate mail agent and Cox's foster brother, kept them supplied with food and newspapers, gathering intelligence on the side by listening to Union patrols talk at the local store.

Rich Hill itself, built around 1729, is the newest reason to make this drive. Charles County and the Historical Society of Charles County spent years on the restoration, supported by $63,000 in grants, and the house opened to the public this summer. Programming has leaned into the parts of the story that older versions of this route skipped: a September 19 program titled "Say Their Names: Remembering the Enslaved African Americans at Historic Rich Hill" begins at 1 p.m.

That thread runs through every stop here. The tavern, the farm and the plantation were all worked by enslaved people, and the men who sheltered Booth were sympathizers for reasons the route makes plain if you look for them.

The crossing

After nearly a week of hiding the most wanted man in America, Jones led the pair to the Potomac after dark, to a rowboat he had hidden on the bank, and pushed them off. The river runs two miles wide there and was patrolled by Union gunboats. A historical marker on Popes Creek Road in Newburg, Maryland, marks the crossing point.

Herold lost his bearings and rowed for hours, ending up back on the Maryland shore near Indiantown. They tried again the following night and landed in Virginia on April 23, making for the home of Elizabeth Quesenberry, a Confederate underground operative, who fed them.

Port Royal

The small Museum of American History in Port Royal, on Route 301, houses the Assassin's End Collection — the story told from the perspective of the people who lived here, including a hinge from the Garrett barn.

Booth stopped at the Brockenbrough-Peyton House, still standing in Port Royal, and was turned away by a young woman home alone who didn't recognize him. The town is exploring plans to restore the house.

A few miles south, at the junction of routes 301 and 17, a historical marker titled "Where Booth Died" stands near the former Richard Henry Garrett farm. Booth arrived calling himself John Boyd, a wounded Confederate soldier. Garrett, worried the strangers would steal his horses, made them sleep in the tobacco barn and locked them in.

Before dawn on April 26, the 16th New York Cavalry surrounded the barn. Herold surrendered. Booth, armed and refusing, stayed inside as the soldiers set it alight, and Sgt. Boston Corbett shot him through the neck through a gap in the barn wall. He died on the Garrett porch that morning at 26, carrying a compass, a diary, his planning documents and photographs of five women.

Booth had written that he wished to “die bravely.” “I have too great a soul to die like a criminal,” he wrote, and he went down fighting.

The 12-day attempted escape and chase following the most flamboyant murder in history came to an end. The story still intrigues today.  

If you go

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