Wilkes Booth

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.

John E. Mudd, a partner in the law firm of Mudd, Harrison and Burch who specialized in medical malpractice and insurance cases, died of respiratory failure Monday at his Towson home. He was 75. In a legal career that spanned nearly 50 years, Mr. Mudd was a likable and highly respected figure. "I remember him coming to Towson and joining my father's law firm in the early 1960s. He was a young, bright and energetic lawyer who was instantly popular. And he spent the rest of his life practicing law in Towson," said Baltimore County Circuit Judge John Grason Turnbull II. "In the courtroom, he was dynamic and friendly, and always came across that way to jurors.

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.

The nation was gripped in deep mourning when President Abraham Lincoln died April 15, 1863, hours after he was shot during a performance of Our American Cousin at Washington's Ford's Theatre. Eleven days would pass before his assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, a Harford County native, would be found hiding in a barn in Bowling Green, Va. After Booth shot Lincoln, he made his way to Anacostia, Va., where he was met by David Herold, a young accomplice, and the pair made their way through Southern Maryland to Port Tobacco.

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.

If he were alive today, John Wilkes Booth would have little trouble recognizing the farmhouse of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, where he had come seeking help 136 years ago today. The land surrounding the Southern Maryland house looks much as it did when Booth, in pain from a broken leg, knocked on Mudd's door some six hours after the actor fatally shot Abraham Lincoln about 30 miles away at Ford's Theatre in Washington. If you want to see the Mudd house in its natural surroundings, don't wait too long.

BRYANTOWN - The countryside around Dr. Samuel A. Mudd's house looks much as it must have more than a century ago, when actor John Wilkes Booth rode up on horseback seeking medical attention for the leg he had broken that night at Ford's Theater in Washington. A rutted dirt road leads from Mudd's two-story white frame house through an open field toward murky Zekiah Swamp. It is a snippet of the tortuous route Booth took as he fled through Southern Maryland after shooting Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.

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.

PERHAPS fate or poetic justice decreed that a young couple would outbid more organized suitors for Tudor Hall, the home near Bel Air that once belonged to the Booth family.The nearby community college wanted it. Actors Stacy Keach and Hal Holbrook lent support to the college because several members of the Booth family were renowned Shakespearean actors in the 19th century. Historians also have great interest in the property because one of Junius Brutus and Mary Ann Booth's 10 children was John Wilkes, who killed President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

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.