We've headed down to Bel Alton, MD, to the site of a former pine thicket where Booth and Herold hid out from April 16 to April 20.

Some of the locals are having fun with an empty house that was here at the pine thicket when Booth was hiding nearby.  October may not have arrived quite yet, but there's at least one Halloween ghoul hanging out of a window.

Sure enough, even Charles County agrees John Wilkes Booth and David Herold hid out nearby.

Ed Bearss really got wound up telling us the story of what happened here.

UPDATE: Back in 2012 I used Flash to display videos in this website, but now in 2024 Flash no longer works.  So I've edited the website to use YouTube to display the videos. Also, the old camera I was using back in 2012 really did a terrible job of capturing sound. Sorry about the background noise..

Ed knows his stuff.  He's telling us about how Booth used his time in the pine thicket to write in his journal.  Old JWB really knew how to spin a whopper.  By the time he reached this pine thicket, the story of his simple leg fracture had turned into a major medical emergency -- a compound fracture with bone exposed through the skin. 

Ed has the whole crowd in the palm of his hand.

See?  We really are in Bel Alton, 20611.

There's a house back there behind those trees.  Really, I promise.  It's a private home, though, and the owners wouldn't appreciate a busload of tourists on their lawn. 

So we have to view it from afar.  It's "Huckleberry," the former home of Thomas A. Jones, a man who provided aid to the fugitives when they were in the pine thicket, and who fed them here.  Sure wish we could have had a better view of Huckleberry.