How a museum dedicated to ‘The Mad Booths of Maryland’ deals with infamy — and fame
By Eddie Dean,
Andrew Mangum
for The Washington Post
Judy Savage leads a tour at Tudor Hall, a museum devoted to Junius Brutus Booth, the father of presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth, in Bel Air, Md. She describes the family, which also included Junius’s other son, Edwin Booth, as “America’s greatest Shakespearean actors.”
It’s easy to miss the turn off the road that leads to the ancestral home of a once-famous family of actors. Route 22 meanders through the suburban sprawl of Bel Air, a short commute from Baltimore. Follow a secluded, tree-lined driveway past a spring-fed pond to a clearing. Here you find a steep-gabled house with diamond-pane windows.
Except for a weathered marker — placed in 1931 by the Historical Society of Harford County — there is little hint of the stature of the house’s one-time residents as the most revered showbiz family of 19th-century America. Superstars of the stage, Junius Brutus Booth and his son Edwin are mostly forgotten today outside the thespian community. Their home was funded by Junius’s blockbuster career performing Shakespeare’s tragedies, which were all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic in the antebellum era.
But missing from the roadside sign is the Booth everyone remembers. That would be John Wilkes — wayward son, Confederacy supporter, and presidential assassin.
It is the father, Junius, who first takes center stage at the house, known as Tudor Hall — and it’s well into a tour guide’s presentation that the offspring enter the scene. In fact, the organization that operates the house as a museum is called the Junius B. Booth Society. It educates the public about the patriarch and his talented but troubled brood. A 1940 book about the family was titled “The Mad Booths of Maryland”; in the words of one family acquaintance, they shared “an inherited strain of darkness.”
Tom Fink, president of the all-volunteer society, installed the exhibits and runs the museum on a shoestring budget; Harford County, which purchased Tudor Hall in 2006, maintains the grounds. The society supplements its Sunday tours with lectures by visiting speakers, on topics such as “Edwin and John Wilkes Booth: A House Divided,” and “A Long Look Backward: From the Pen of Asia Booth,” about the daughter’s memoirs. It also publishes a newsletter, with articles such as, “Was the Booth Farm Used to Help Runaway Slaves?”
Tour guide Judy Savage describes the Booths as “America’s greatest Shakespearean actors.” However, their legacy is today inseparable from white supremacy and slavery. According to Savage, Junius opposed slavery — yet he also bought an enslaved person, Joe Hall (whom he granted freedom after five years). His sons, meanwhile, headed in opposite political directions: Edwin was a staunch abolitionist who voted for Abraham Lincoln, while John Wilkes became a defender of slavery — and, in assassinating President Lincoln, would strike a massive blow against both the Union and the cause of racial equality.
Andrew Mangum
for The Washington Post
Visitors at Tudor Hall.
In the foyer of Tudor Hall, framed portraits of Junius as Richard III and Edwin as Hamlet greet visitors. Exhibits offer a deeper dive into the nooks and crannies of the family’s history. The walls are decorated with vintage playbills, with P.T. Barnum-era promo hype rendered in ecstatic all-caps and exclamation points.
Already famous when he emigrated from England in 1821, Junius Brutus stormed the American theater like a one-man British Invasion. He had a manic intensity that thrilled audiences, including Walt Whitman. He performed visibly under the influence and he broke character to taunt hecklers. “THE MAD TRAGEDIAN HAS COME TO OUR CITY,” warned one headline.
Junius settled his family here as an offseason retreat from touring. On the farm, he swore off the bottle and hoed barefoot to immerse himself in nature, according to historians. A vegetarian, he would not allow the killing of animals on his property.
John Wilkes gets his fair share of floor space at the museum, which was his boyhood home. It was here that he roamed the woods on horseback and hunted game against his father’s wishes.
Because Junius was often on the road and died when John Wilkes was only 14, the rebellious teenager never had much interaction with his father, according to Fink. Instead, John Wilkes’s views on race were influenced by the rich sons of plantation owners that he befriended at boarding schools he attended near Baltimore.
After Junius’s death in 1852, it was Edwin who carried the torch into the second half of the 19th century, surpassing the elder Booth in critical acclaim and adulation. Edwin’s acting style became the gold standard for American theater, with entire books on his portrayals of Hamlet. Yet his life was marked by tragedy; he was twice widowed and struggled with alcohol and depression. John Wilkes’s assassination of Lincoln brought Edwin death threats, and forced him to retire from the stage for nearly a year. As an avowed Unionist, he regained public sympathy but never performed in Washington again.
Andrew Mangum
for The Washington Post
People gather for the start of a guided tour.
The challenge, of course, is how to accurately describe the family’s history as successful actors while not downplaying their connection to slavery, the evil perpetrated by John Wilkes, or the racist context for subsequent celebrations of the assassin by neo-Confederates. Indeed, it isn’t just the memory of the family that is marred by links to the Confederacy — so, too, is the history of the house itself: When Tudor Hall first opened for tourists in the 1920s, it was owned by Ella Mahoney, a Harford County native and former neighbor who venerated the Booths and was also a Lincoln hater.
The subject of slavery is part of the house tour — which notes the role Junius played in the slavery system. And Terry Alford, author of “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth,” a 2015 biography, praises the society for seeking to elevate public recognition of Edwin, who opposed slavery. “Historians regard Tom and his group very highly for what they’re trying to do at Tudor Hall, in their efforts to burnish the acting side of the house and to fly the Edwin Booth flag,” Alford told me. “To focus on the non-John members of the family is a good way to go, because they are very colorful characters and compelling people.”
Andrew Mangum
for The Washington Post
A display case at the house and museum.
As for when the assassin is discussed, the society says it takes a scholarly approach: “We can put [John Wilkes] in the proper context at Tudor Hall because this is where he grew up,” Fink says. “We make sure that no one glorifies John Wilkes.”
On a recent Sunday, visitors to Tudor Hall packed a small room to hear a lecture on the poisonous posthumous legacy of John Wilkes in popular culture. Kate Jones, a 19th-century murder researcher, presented an overview that included clips from films, TV shows and video games.
When it comes to the family’s theatrical legacy, Fink notes that John Wilkes — despite his box-office power in the 1860s, when he was earning a princely $20,000 a year onstage — was no acting genius on par with Junius and Edwin. He was more of a matinee idol and action hero.
Asia Booth also gets her turn in the spotlight on the tour. She vowed, in the dark days after the assassination, to vindicate the family name. In 1866, she published “Booth Memorials,” a biography of Junius. A century and a half later, it’s certainly worthwhile to know more about the Booths’ theatrical accomplishments — but hard to see how those successes could ever be more than a footnote in the family tree.
Eddie Dean is a writer in Maryland.
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