Biography - Photos - References - Media - Contact - Appearances & Events - WilliamFuld.com Media By Larry Perl Think you know where John Wilkes Booth is buried? Think again Better step lively on Wayne Schaumburg's 2 1/2-hour tour of Green Mount Cemetery. There's more than you can see in that block of time, including a headstone that looks like a Ouija board, a monument under plexiglass, John Wilkes Booth's grave -- or is it? -- and sculptures of a finger pointing skyward, a woman dropping rose petals and a dog sitting faithfully at its master's feet. There are also plainer graves, for the religious or unassuming, including a nondescript marker, notable only for the name of its remarkable resident, who was worth about $8 million when he died. "What's Johns Hopkins doing in a slab?" Schaumburg asked rhetorically as he led the first cemetery tour of the season Oct. 3. "He's a Quaker." But a grave that really had the tour group gawking was graced by a chunk of iron. The headstone that accompanies the monument identified the man interred there as one Samuel Buckley, but Schaumburg said there was no information about him in city directories of the mid-1800s, other than his name, so it is anybody's guess who he was, or what the hunk of misshapen metal meant. "Take your best choice and run with it," Schaumburg told the tour group of about 40 people. If he doesn't know, it's likely no one does. Now in his 23rd year as a tour guide, the retired public school teacher is totally in his element here, and certainly the livest wire, using 39 years of teaching experience to bring the cemetery to life. But he's best known as an unofficial tour guide at the cemetery. He got his start in 1985 while working for the old Baltimore City Life (formerly Peale) Museum, which then handled the tours. After he helped museum officials on a tour, "they discovered I knew more about the place than they did." Schaumburg leads four tours each in October and May, because those months always seem to have good weather, he said. Tours cost $15 per person and typically draw 40 people, the maximum he allows. (Sorry, the next tour is filled and there's a waiting list, but you can sign up for the May tours, or wait until next October, when the last tour falls on ... Halloween!) He splits the profit with the cemetery management, after paying for postage for mailings and photocopies of nine-page handouts, cemetery maps that denote who's buried where, and waiver forms that hold the management harmless if tourgoers are injured. (The dead didn't rise up, but one woman fainted in the unseasonable heat Oct. 3, the first such incident in his 23 years, he said.) A passion for the past keeps Schaumburg coming back. "I love Baltimore history, and this is Baltimore history galore," said the former Waverly youth. 68,000 souls Surrounded by a wall and accessible through a one-car archway at Greenmount Avenue and Oliver Street, the cemetery is 68 acres of peace and quiet, a five-minute drive from downtown. About 68,000 are interred at Green Mount, "stadium seating for a Ravens game," Schaumburg said, treating his subject matter more lightly than the founders of the cemetery did. "This is a Victorian cemetery," he said, "and the Victorians knew how to do it right." "This is the Victorians trying to deal with death and make it a nice place to picnic," he said. Its popularity endures. Nobody whose family doesn't already own a lot can get in, except for about 20,000 spaces in the mausoleum, Schaumburg said. Green Mount Cemetery opened in 1839 on 60 acres purchased by a group calling itself The Proprieters, which still runs it. The first person to be buried there was 2-year-old Olivia Cushing Whitridge. Why she died is unknown. Green Mount was conceived as a public "garden" cemetery, but the high cost of interment, $100 per burial lot, limited who could afford to be laid to rest there. Dying to get in As a result, it's the final resting place mostly of the influential and affluent such as library system founder Enoch Pratt; the sculptor William Henry Rinehart (who had designed monuments for others interred there); the Duchesse de Richelieu, Elinor Douglas Wise; and Mayor Thomas Swann, who earmarked a penny of each nickel ride on horse-drawn streetcars for the city's coffers. That paid for recreation areas including Robert E. Lee Park and Lake Roland. Etta Maddox, the first female lawyer in Maryland, is buried there, as is A.S. Abell, the original publisher of The Sun (that's him under the plexiglass-covered monument). "This is where Baltimore's best are laid to rest," Schaumberg told the tour group. "If you were anybody from 1850 to 1950, this is where you were laid to rest." Some families moved kin there from other cemeteries, but one woman excluded family members she never liked, Schaumberg said. Some families fenced their lots. Then there was Moses Sheppard, as in Sheppard Pratt Hospital. He bought a double lot and left instructions that only he could be buried there. His is the site where a finger points skyward. North Baltimore is well represented. Robert Poole, a Hampden foundry owner and philanthropist, lies there, and Walter Lord, a Gilman grad, who turned his class speech about the sinking of the Titanic into the classic "A Night to Remember." A few scoundrels slipped in, including Booth, the Lincoln assassin and a favorite of tourgoers. Schaumberg saves the best (or worst) for last. "Let's do Booth and then we're done," he told the tour group. But although the family's plot is there and Booth is listed first of the seven children of Junius and Mary Booth on the monument, the exact whereabouts of the infamous son's remains are unknown. All of the children have headstones except for him because his brother, Edwin, who convinced the feds to release his body, decided a headstone was not advisable, Schaumburg said. "He's there somewhere," but exactly where is a secret that Schaumberg said even he doesn't know. A few unfortunate souls rest at the cemetery, including John Hurst, whose dry goods company went up in flames -- the first casualty of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. Found at last Some are nameless; their graves are either unmarked or the stones are too weathered to read. "Nobody in the office has kept any records of what's inscribed. Once it erodes, it's lost, and that's a shame," he said. Others were rescued from obscurity. One was Poole. Cemetery officials knew little about him until his granddaughter looked for his grave 5-6 years ago, Schaumburg said. Another was attorney Elijah Jefferson Bond, original patentee of the Ouija board invented by William Fuld. Bond's grave was unmarked until Robert Murch, a Ouija board buff in Boston, found it last October. Murch, who runs the Web site www.williamfuld.com, started raising money for a marker. It was erected in July. The other side looks like a Ouija board, with arcs of letters and numbers and one word below: "Goodbye." To sign up for tours, e-mail tour guide Wayne Schaumburg at w.schaumburg@earthlink.net. OUIJA® and MYSTIFYING ORACLE® are both trademarks of Hasbro, Inc.
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