Very sad news: Laurie Verge has passed

[RJNorton]

Many thanks to Bob Cook for sending:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I visited our recently-departed and much-lamented Good Friend Laurie Verge's grave site the other day - approximately seven miles north-northwest of here.

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2292...y-cemetery

and

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2292...etery/map- Map & Satellite View

Although I have not, as yet, personally verified it with Laurie's daughter Jennifer that it was Laurie's specific instruction to be buried where she is - I assume Laurie did because it would otherwise seem to me to be just way too much of a coincidence that the (Mays - Laurie's maiden name) plot within the burial ground where she is now at rest is adjacent to the (generally-accepted - but now paved, of course) Mattawoman-Beantown Road section of the JWB escape route just south of the (historic sign-markered) location where John Wilkes Booth and David Edgar Herold crossed over from southern Prince George's County into northern Charles County, Maryland on the night of April 14/15, 1865 on their way to the home of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd.

Despite the Huntt Family Cemetery's location being in very close proximity to several outdoor commercial strip mall businesses, the cemetery is on a hill-rise within a self-contained, rural-looking, approximately one-acre site. Although its location (behind Pinefield Liquor and Lefty's Barbecue in the Pinefield South Shopping Center at the intersection of Crain Highway/Route 301 and Mattawoman Drive) would make it very convenient for present and future Lincoln assassination researchers (on the JWB escape route roads) to stop off at her grave site to pay their respects to this supremely generous and truly encyclopedic) JWB and Lincoln assassination expert, the cemetery's being surrounded by a 6-foot-high, padlocked and chain-secured chain link fence makes it impossible to visit Laurie's gravesite close-up.

However the location does permit Laurie to now enjoy being perpetually along the John Wilkes Booth Escape Route - a situation that, for perhaps some or others of us, might also be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Robert W. (Bob) Cook