Port Royal, Virginia: Tobacco Town and the Death of Booth
Near Colonial Beach, Virginia
Port Royal was established in sixteen fifty-two as a tobacco port on the Rappahannock River, one of the earliest chartered towns in Virginia. For two centuries it moved hogsheads of cured leaf downriver, maintained a ferry crossing into Caroline County, and served planters trading in thoroughbred horses. Its colonial courthouse still stands near the river bluff.
Then, in April of eighteen sixty-five, history arrived violently. John Wilkes Booth had shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on April fourteenth. Twelve days later, on April twenty-sixth, federal cavalry tracked Booth to the farm of Richard Garrett, a couple of miles south of Port Royal across the Rappahannock.
Booth and a companion had crossed the river here, hoping to continue south into the Confederacy. Soldiers surrounded the tobacco barn before dawn and set it alight. Booth refused to surrender.
Sergeant Boston Corbett fired through a gap in the barn planks and mortally wounded him. Booth died on the Garrett porch two hours later, twelve days after Lincoln.
