Wilkes Booth

Walking into Tudor Hall last weekend was like walking back in time. Gone were modern-day problems, replaced by the chivalry, elegance andsimplicity of a grand Civil War-era ball.Tudor Hall -- a 150-year-old Gothic Revival two-story, once the home of the Booth family, including John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln's assassin -- seemed the perfect setting as 50 people, dressed in period costumes, danced to the music of the 19th century."It's like going back in time, with the gaslight and the candlelight," said Ann Phillips of Fallston, president of the Preservation Association of Tudor Hall, a non-profit group that raises money to restore and maintain the house.

It's almost universal knowledge that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater on an April night in 1865. But after taking a guided bus tour in 1986 that detailed Booth's escape route, Tom Jennings discovered that there was a lot more to the story. "Many people don't know that Booth was on the run for 12 days ...

The Mystery of John Wilkes BoothI have read with approval the views expressed in your March 25 editorial, "John Wilkes Booth: RIP."Nathaniel Orlowek believes that the man shot in Richard Garrett's barn in Caroline County, Va., on April 26, 1865, was not John Wilkes Booth. Further, he believes that Booth escaped to wander the earth and end up a suicide on Jan. 13, 1903, in a cheap hotel at Enid, Oklahoma Territory, using the alias of David E. George. Thus Mr. Orlowek contends that the body buried in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery could not be that of Booth.

PHILADELPHIA - In the annals of history, the Mudd name has been inexorably linked with John Wilkes Booth - and the plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington in 1865. One hundred thirty-six years have passed since a military tribunal sentenced Samuel Mudd to life in prison for his part in the conspiracy; 132 years have passed since the sentence was commuted. Now, the doctor will have his day in a civilian court, after descendants - seeking to clear Mudd's name - won a legal victory this month.

WHEN THE late William S. James, the former state treasurer and president of the Maryland Senate, was introducing legislation as a young member of the House of Delegates from Havre de Grace, so the story goes, he was admonished by a colleague: He had failed to show the proposal first to the editor of Harford County's hometown newspaper, the Aegis. Mr. James realized his omission and, after the fact, ran his idea past Editor John D. Worthington Jr.Opined the Aegis' subsequent editorial of Mr. James' bill: "Good idea, poorly presented."

For seven students, a tour of Baltimore's rich black history began yesterday with a bitter remembrance and ended with a living witness of desegregating the city schools in 1954. First stop on a cool afternoon was Green Mount Cemetery, where John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, is buried in his family plot. "I hope they don't have a glorified grave site for this guy who killed a president," said Brandon Hall, 17, a senior at Boys' Latin School, where tour guide Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. teaches U.S. and African-American history.

Robert Rinehart, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Southampton Middle School in Bel Air, began a journey of self-discovery five years ago when he found a diary-size manuscript in his parents' desk. The manuscript told the story of his great-great-grandfather Samuel Hoover's life as a young man during the Civil War. When Rinehart first held the slender text, a mere 10 pages of type, he had no idea how its contents would change him as an individual and as a history teacher. Rinehart was recently named "Civil War Teacher of the Year" by the Civil War Preservation Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to battlefield preservation.

The crowd's relief was almost palpable yesterday, as Robert Baker signed a set of contracts spread on the hood of an old, gray Ford Escort.With his signature, the fate of Tudor Hall -- the former Harford County home of Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth -- seemed assured.Baker, 29, and his wife, Elizabeth, offered the winning bid of $415,000 at the auction of the Gothic-style house, whose sale had prompted concerns among Harford County residents and history buffs nationwide that the structure might be razed.

Actor Gary Sloan can think of only three families who qualify as acting dynasties: the Booths, the Barrymores and the Redgraves.So he suggests it's more than merely notable that Lynn Redgrave is coming to Maryland this weekend to support efforts to restore Tudor Hall, the Harford County home of Junius Brutus Booth, patriarch of classical acting in America.Was it, perhaps, pre-ordained?After all, when Ms. Redgrave stepped inside the front door of Tudor Hall for the first time in April, she said, "I'm home," Dorothy Fox says.

Two months after John Wilkes Booth was shot to death in a burning barn in Bowling Green, Va., Mary E. Surratt and three men were executed for conspiring with Booth to kill President Abraham Lincoln. One hundred thirty-eight years after Surratt, a devout Roman Catholic, went to her death on the gallows at Washington's Arsenal Prison, doubt persists about her role in the April 1865 murder of the president. Born Mary Elizabeth Jenkins in 1823 in Southern Maryland, she was educated at a parochial school in Alexandria, Va. She was married in 1840 to John Harrison Surratt.