A Visit to Green Mount Cemetery

My research into the personal and professional life of presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth, led me to his gravesite, located at the Booth Family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.

When John Wilkes Booth was shot and killed 12 days after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in 1865, his body was wrapped in a saddle blanket and taken back to Washington, D.C. for an autopsy. Once the autopsy and official examination were complete, Booth's body was placed inside a pine ammunition box and discretely buried beneath the floorboards of a storeroom at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington, D.C.

For the next four years, John Wilkes Booth's brother, Edwin, made numerous requests to the government to have his brother's remains released to the family. It was not until 1869, however, that President Andrew Johnson finally granted Edwin's repeated requests and released the assassin's body.

Even four years after his death, the body of John Wilkes Booth was still recognizable according to Edwin Booth and close friends, and his left leg was still bandaged from the night Doctor Samuel Mudd set the assassin's broken leg at his farmhouse in Waldorf, Maryland.

Edwin arranged to have his brother's remains buried at the Booth family plot in Green Mount Cemetery. Prior to burial, John Wilkes Booth's body was temporarily kept in the John H. Weaver vault located at Green Mount Cemetery.

A private service and burial for John Wilkes Booth was held on Saturday, June 26, 1869. The reverend who performed the ceremony was later rejected by his congregation.

John Wilkes Booth was buried in an unmarked grave. Today, visitors to Green Mount Cemetery often mistake the foot stone belonging to Booth's sister, Asia Booth Clarke, to be the assassin's headstone. This is a mistake, however, and to this day John Wilkes Booth's grave is unmarked, prompting many historians to continue to speculate the exact location of the assassin's remains within the family plot.