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Piece of blood-stained floor



Fragment from Confederate flag

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Marshall House



Site of the Marshall House



Marshall House plaque

 

 

 




 

Piece of bloodstained floor covering and fragment of the Confederate flag from the Marshall House


The Marshall House occupied the corner of King Street and Pitt Street in Alexandria. Contemporary accounts described it as being a second-class hotel. Yet after the Ellsworth-Jackson shootings, the property became a mecca for sightseers. Thousands of Union soldiers passing through Alexandria during the war toured the Marshall House, and many carried away souvenirs of the building. Mary Henry, daughter of the Smithsonian Institution’s secretary, Joseph Henry, visited the Marshall House eleven days after the shootings. She noticed that the banisters and two of the stairs near where Ellsworth had fallen, as well as pieces of the windows and doors, “have already been carried off as relics.” And she admitted to walking away with “a small piece of the flag staff.”

Shown here is a piece of bloodstained floor covering and a fragment of the Confederate flag, which Ellsworth removed from a flagpole on the roof.


History of Technology, Armed Forces History
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Behring Center
Gift of M. F. Healy

 

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