Tudor Hall: The Booth Family's Maryland Home

A mile or so from Route One near Bel Air, Maryland, a Gothic Revival cottage sits on a hill behind old oaks. Tudor Hall was built by Junius Brutus Booth, the most celebrated Shakespearean actor in nineteenth-century America, as a country retreat from his Baltimore life. He began construction in the late eighteen forties. He died before the cottage was finished.

Junius Brutus Booth was born in London in seventeen ninety-six and came to the United States in eighteen twenty-one after building a reputation as one of the finest Shakespearean tragedians of his era. He was also erratic, troubled by alcoholism, and by a secret second family he maintained in Maryland while his legal wife remained in England. His American family eventually had ten children. Three of them became actors.

Edwin Booth was born on this property in eighteen thirty-three, two decades before Tudor Hall existed, in an older farmhouse. He would grow into the greatest American stage actor of the nineteenth century, a Hamlet so definitive that his performances became the standard against which all others were measured for a generation. His older brother Junius Brutus Booth Junior also worked in theater.

And then there was John Wilkes Booth, who moved into Tudor Hall with his mother after their father's death in eighteen fifty-two and lived here through most of eighteen fifty-six. He grew up riding these Maryland fields and hunting the Harford County woods. He trained as an actor in his brother Edwin's shadow and was considered talented but impulsive.

On April fourteenth, eighteen sixty-five, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington. The most famous actor's family in American history produced both the nation's greatest stage actor and its most consequential assassin, and both of them spent their boyhoods within sight of this cottage on a Maryland hill.