Word: mudd
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...same time Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson under suspicion of complicity with Booth in the assassination of President Lincoln...
...Mudd had hobbies, so did the lighthouse keeper. The prisoner was allowed to whittle; the lone keeper of the light fiddled, painted, collected rare corals and ran down huge turtles which gave those islands their name...
These inmates became friends, as the soldier, Willard, my grandfather, made necessary visits to the prison for his supplies. They exchanged corals for walking sticks, violin bows for turtle shells. Your tintype of Dr. Mudd shows him whittling another cane of hard wood, one of which is in my collection. My grandfather's painting of his lighthouse home, and the little sailboat Jenney of Loggerhead is on my wall before...
When the epidemic was over, grateful survivors addressed to President Andrew Johnson a fervent petition for Dr. Mudd's release. It never reached the White House. A new commanding officer sent the physician back to his dungeon, chains and labor. There he stayed until the spring of 1869 when President Johnson finally released him. Health broken and still suspect among his neighbors, Dr. Mudd tried for 14 years without success to win back his old life. In 1883, aged 50, he went out on a stormy night to attend a patient, caught pneumonia, quickly died...
...Carved and scribbled everywhere are visitors' names, initials, wisecracks. This appalling ruin, a fortress which never traded shots with a single enemy, President Roosevelt last week declared a National Monument.* It was at once suggested that the monument might appropriately be left in its present state, renamed Fort Mudd...