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Photographer: Allen C. Browne
Taken: April 13, 2014
Caption: “O” from the Marshall House Sign
Additional Description: “The Marshall House became a mecca for souvenir hunters after the deaths of Ellsworth and Jackson. A Union soldier from Rhode Island documented in a letter how he had taken a portion of the building's exterior sign “…I got in Alexandria at the Marshall House where Ellsworth was killed (took) the letter “O” of the sign off the house. They are built of gilt letters…” The soldier also obtained pieces of the stairway and banister as mementos. This practice was so common that by 1862 when the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the Marshall house, he wrote “The memorial-hunters have completely cut away the original woodwork…thus it becomes something like a metaphysical question whether the place of the murder actually exists.” — Fort Ward Museum.
Submitted: February 21, 2015, by Allen C. Browne of Silver Spring, Maryland.
Database Locator Identification Number: p300792
File Size: 1.513 Megabytes

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