John Patrick Brophy

[Susan Higginbotham]

Didn't know about the governess to Mr Gwynn. If it was Bennett Gwynn, he lived a mile from Surratt House, and those of you who attend our conferences drive through his old farm to reach the museum. When you leave Colony South and go straight through the light at Route 5/Branch Avenue, you are on Surratts Road and Gwynn's property (even when I was a child). It is now a large housing development called Summit Creek. The farm was Mt. Auburn, and the house was still standing until about forty years ago -- along with a charming red barn that artists and photographers used to stop and commit to canvas and film.

The governess bit is mentioned in the Washington Evening Star of February 21, 1867, in a piece about John Surratt's prison quarters. It states, "The sister, Miss Anna Surratt, was last fall the governess in the family of Capt. B. Gwynn, in the lower part of Prince George's County, but for several weeks past she has been in this city, stopping with some of her relatives, and it is expected that this afternoon she will visit her brother."

(Anna did have more than her fair share of improbable news stories about her--one claimed in September 1867 that Anna had departed for Europe while the jury was deliberating her brother's fate-- but the governess story seems plausible enough.)