Trivial Trivia - taking trivia to new levels

[L Verge]

The Civil War Round Table of New York puts out a small, but informative newsletter. The February issue cited Eva's work on researching the Rathbones in Germany. On the back page, they posted a tidbit of trivia that I had never heard before.

When Booth was killed, one of the significant things used to identify his body was a stick (stock) pin that he had used to hold together some of his underwear. The pin had been a present from his friend, Daniel Emmett, and was so engraved.

Daniel Emmett is well-known by people who enjoyed music of the mid-1800s. He is credited with authoring "Dixie Land," the original name of what we have shortened to "Dixie." The tune was first performed in a theater at 472 Broadway in 1859 by Bryant's Minstrels, the most popular blackface troupe in the city. It soon became a great favorite with lower-Manhattan's white, working class citizens - many of whom had high sympathies for the Southern cause.

This little newsletter tidbit states that the song draws from both black and white folk traditions and its authorship (like that of many minstrel tunes) gets a big tangled. Daniel Emmett was from Ohio, and he is buried in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, just three miles from another gravestone of Ben and Lew Snowden, sons of freed slaves from the South. The Snowden gravestone is inscribed, "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan Emmett.

Rich and Jim - do you have photos of either of those stones? I am also curious as to whether the Snowdens may have originated in Maryland. One of our public, historic house museums here in Prince George's County is Montpelier Mansion (which rivals anything Williamsburg has to offer). It was the ancestral home of a very wealthy Quaker family, which ended up freeing their slaves.

Here I go believing in Six Degrees of Separation again when it comes to the Lincoln assassination story.