New Booth Pic?

[L Verge]

Having stared at the photo long enough, I went online to see if there was anything in Tamaqua's history that might give a clue. Interesting little town whose history rose and fell based around the coal industry and the railroad.

Since we can only theorize that Booth or his look-alike arrived in town via the railroad, I wanted to find out when the rail lines were put in. I could not find a date, but the town was not founded until 1799, and a passenger train station was not built until 1874 -- did any passenger trains pass through the town prior to that? Was the railroad strictly for the transportation of coal during the Booth era?

The demographics of the 19th-century town is what made me perk up! The discovery of anthracite coal in the region in the early-19th century led to the town's rise as a coal-producing community. The town was incorporated as a borough in 1832. Irish, Welsh, and German immigrants came to the borough in the 1840s and 1850s, followed by a large influx of Italians, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Poles. During the 1860s and 1870s, Tamaqua was the geographic center hub for the Molly Maguires. One murder commonly attributed to the Mollies was that of town policeman Benjamin Yost, who was shot to death early one morning while extinguishing a gas lamp at the corner of West Broad and Lehigh Streets.

Since Booth was known to be a Nativist or American Party follower, such a wide variety of ethnic groups would seem to me to have made the town uninviting to him, especially as the war drew to a close.