A Major Historical Find?
From Time to Thyme
By Paula Dunn
This month marks the 161st anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth during the waning days of the Civil War.
The details of Lincoln’s murder at Ford’s Theater are pretty well known, but you may not be as clear on what became of Booth afterward.
After fleeing the theater, the actor rode south with one of his co-conspirators, David Herold. The two men made it as far as a tobacco farm near Port Royal, a small town in northern Virginia, before a detachment of Union soldiers caught up to them.
Herold surrendered and voluntarily left the barn in which he and Booth were hiding, but Booth refused to come out. The soldiers then set fire to the building to force him out.
Booth was shot while attempting to escape the blaze. He died on the porch of the farmhouse.
That’s the official story, anyway.
In 1907, a lawyer, Finis L. Bates, published a book in which he claimed the man killed at the tobacco farm wasn’t Booth. (An interesting aside — Bates was the grandfather of Academy Award-winning actress, Kathy Bates.)
Bates wrote that, while he was living in Texas in the 1870s, he’d been friendly with a man he knew as “John St. Helen.” At one point during that time, St. Helen was stricken with what he believed was a fatal illness, so he made a deathbed confession to Bates that he was really Booth.
St. Helen didn’t die, however. After he recovered, he told his story to Bates, revealing that the man who’d been shot in the barn had simply been carrying his papers.
Eventually, both Bates and St. Helen moved out of Texas and lost touch. Bates heard no more about St. Helen until 1903 when he was notified that St. Helen, or “David E. George,” as he was known then, had committed suicide in Enid, Oklahoma Territory. (Oklahoma wasn’t a state yet.)
By now you’re probably wondering what the heck all this has to do with Hamilton County, Indiana.
In 1965, a story appeared in the Noblesville Daily Ledger that would seem to support the theory that Booth survived the incident in the tobacco barn.
According to the Ledger, workmen remodeling the Hamilton County courthouse had recently discovered a stash of old papers in the walls of the courthouse tunnel.
The papers were set aside to be burned, but a member of the Hamilton County Historical Society who’d gone combing through the pile of trash to see if anything in it was worth saving, noticed a “neat bundle” tied with a ribbon and pulled it out.
That “neat bundle” turned out to be personal papers that appeared to belong to John Wilkes Booth. The most startling of these was a request for safe passage for the bearer through Indiana. It contained a notation from Westfield, Indiana, dated May 17, 1865.
Booth supposedly died April 26, 1865.
Nobody knew how that paperwork ended up in our courthouse. There was some speculation, however, that Booth might have considered settling here, on the assumption that anyone on his trail would never look for him in such a strongly Union state.
Supposedly, the valuable documents were sent to Indiana University for safekeeping and restoration, but I couldn’t find any additional information about them.
So, what happened? If there was proof John Wilkes Booth had survived the incident in Virginia, let alone considered living in Indiana, that should have been big news.
Were the documents lost or destroyed somehow? Were they stolen by some nefarious person who sought to preserve Booth’s secret?
OR, could it be that the Ledger story was published on APRIL 1? (Just like this column, she added with a grin.)
The information about Bates and his conspiracy theory is all true, though. Look him up.
Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at younggardenerfriend@gmail.com