John Wilkes Booth Slept Here

Telegraph Herald, 1958

Ninety-four years ago today the great treason murder trial of eight persons began. They were being tried for aiding John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Lincoln.

They were taken to the gallows a month later to die for a crime that another man had committed. And this same man—Booth—-had cheated the gallows with the same .38 caliber pistol he used to shoot Lincoln.

This scrap of history is most vivid in the minds of a few Grant County residents of the Potosi-Tennyson area, where it is believed that the assassinator Booth once visited several years before the Civil War.

Mrs. John Dressler, 81-year-old grandchild of the man who once harbored this Eastern traveler, is possibly the only person able to recall a firsthand account of the incident.

A stone house still stands—the same house that the man called John Booth saw being built in the late 1840's. The big structure, built by her grandfather, Frank Mueller, is now owned by Ben Haverland.

The Muellers always tried to accommodate itinerants in their own home for there were few places where strangers could live after disembarking from the St. Louis steamboat at the Potosi landing. One stranger put up by Mueller was a man called John Booth.

Tennyson, known as Dutch Hollow then, was a thriving lead mine center and Frank Mueller had decided a good store, saloon and dance hall was needed. So he hired Jake Fure to erect the three-story building of native quarry rock.

While Fure and his men were mixing the straw with plaster, they were often being heckled by some unknown prankster.

A few of the villagers knew that the handsome Booth was a ventriloquist of sorts but the construction crew did not. Booth even helped the men look for this culprit when his taunts grew too irksome.

However, despite the distraction of this dandy who did no physical labor, the house was built and it stands as solidly now with a cement coating as it did in 1849. The log house where Booth visited with the Muellers is no longer standing.

Booth enjoyed watching the men work, but the extent of his labors came only when he helped Grandma Mueller clean wild pigeons. (Many a meal was provided by the hordes of pigeons that used to blacken the sky here, Mrs. Dressler said.

The stranger left the Mueller household leaving only the impression of a courteous easterner touring the back country.

It wasn't until some time after the assassination that the Muellers connected the noted actor John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D. C., with John Booth, the actor who had once visited the old stone house at Tennyson.