The following article appeared in the Tupelo Daily Journal a few years ago. The author is the late Journal Feature Editor Phyllis Harper. It provides the starting point for my suspicion that the body of my distant relative, John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, lies hidden in a remote family cemetery near my birthplace in Tupelo. This premise will be contained in an upcoming article, still under development. Guntown is an old, small town north of Tupelo. Many family members, including my mother, were born there. Mother taught school in Guntown many, many years ago.
By Phyllis Harper
Go to Guntown, drive through the small pleasant town with old oaks and magnolias lining it streets. It is quiet, sleepy, especially on a cloudy autumn afternoon. Chances are you will come away thinking that nothing exciting happens here, indeed that noting has ever happened worthy of note. Chances are you may be wrong. One of the greatest dramas of all times may have played out in Guntown more than a century ago. Some believe John Wilkes Booth escaped and lived in hiding at the home of Dr. John Fletcher Booth in Guntown. Some say Lincoln’s assassin is buried in an unmarked grave between Dr. John Fletcher Booth and Dr. George Washington Booth, brothers and prominent physicians and landowners before the Civil War. (Dick Gentry’s grandfather was George Washington Booth Smith, who died in 1922).
An oval gold cuff link engraved “J.W.B.” is the latest clue in this mystery, and conjecture is that a matching link may be in that unmarked grave. John Wilkes Bolth would have been a cousin to the Guntown Booths, perhaps something of a hero in the South in those times, thought not all Southers condoned the killing of President Abraham Lincoln. No one has ever questioned that Booth shot Lincoln that April evening in 1865 as the president watched a performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington. But serious historians have questioned that the body brought out of the burning barn in Virginia was that of John Wilkes Booth, and several have written books offering rather strong evidence that it could not have been.
Stories, aprocryphal some said, survived among Guntown residents, but no one paid much attention. The Guntown brothers were large landholders, wealthier than most, clannish, perhaps a bit strange to their neighbors. The stories, however, continued to surface. Years ago, I met Mrs. Emma Epting Pressey who was known as “Miss Em” and lived monst of her life in Guntown. Granddaughter of Dr. John Fletcher Booth, she told stories handed down from her mother, Jenney Booth Epting, about a mysterious “uncle” who lived upstares in the Booth home.
Children in the family were told not to talk about him to outsiders. This uncle seldom came downstairs only at night. He walked with a limp. He was learned in the classics. One link in a chain of circumstantial evidence comes from Dr. Forrest Tutor, owner of Lochinvar, an antebellum mansion in Pontotoc County built by the Gordon family. Dr. Tutor has a collection of papers and letters left by Col. James Gordon, who met Booth in Canada near the end of the war. Despite being some distance apart, as wealthy landowners the Pontotoc Gordons and the Guntown Booths in those times would more than likely have been friends.
Gordon’s writing implied that he and John Wilkes Booth and others, “desperate men” he termed them, planned to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for political ransom. Gordon siad Booth “and other hotheads jumped the gun and carried out the assassination.” Gordon was questioned afterward, but proved to the Union forces’ satisfaction that he was not involved. Miss Em once told me it was all conjecture, and only the Good Lord will ever know for sure,” which may be true. But with the advent of interest in genealogical research, Booth cousins – some several times removed – began to meet and compare notes. Last year Charles Booth, active in the Itawamba (County) Historical Society, took me to the gravesite he believes to be that of his distant cousin John Wilkes. A subsequent picture and story in the Daily Journal reached the hands of Louis Parks in Ocala, Fla.
I got a letter from Parks last week, saying that as a child he overheard his grandmother discussing with her brother, Bernard Hess Booth, a collar button engraved J.W.B that came from the Booth house in Guntown. Parks recalled that in his youth children “were seen and not heard. And, Grandmother was a Booth, which means brilliant and high-strung. With those people, I suppose I sensed, one doesn’t ask prying questions. Grandmother loved her grandchildren, but they stayed in their place, according to proper decorum.”
Parks learned that his cousin, Dr. Bruce R. Parks Jr. of Jackson, had the engraved object in his possession, and wanted to see it. He expected “the item probably had fancy, script engraving and stated ‘J.F.B’. ( J.W.B.). On a recent trip to visit his cousin, he saw the “gold oval-shaped cufflink. The engraving is plainly, J.W.B. I am now wondering whether the body in the unmarked grave at Guntown might not be buried with the mate.”
I wonder, too. Some historians get defensive about the original story of Booth’s death being the true version, and they may be right. The old Booth home in Guntown is gone, burned years ago. If Booth is buried in Guntown, the old cemetery holds a well-kept secret.
Dick Gentry at the possible burial site of John Wilkes Booth in a remote family cemetery in Guntown, MS
