Boothden

 place with historical importance, cottage, estate (manor / mansion land), mansion / manor house / villa

The seaside mansion built for Edwin Booth, the famous tragic actor whose brother assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

Edwin Booth built the house in 1883, after a long career as a Shakespearean actor of world renown. He won and lost his fortune several times and endured professional difficulties after his brother, John Wilkes Booth, also an actor, shot President Lincoln at the Ford Theater in 1865.

more - "Booth had the house built on pastoral Indian Avenue, which slopes down to the Sakonnet River and offers views of Third Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. As early as the 1700's, the area was known as "Paradise." Nearby are Norman Bird Sanctuary and Sachuset Wildlife Refuge.

The Queen Anne-style mansion was completed 18 years after Lincoln was slain and 10 years before Edwin Booth's death. Booth, who maintained a home in New York City, spent just four summers there.

It's said that his daughter, Edwina, would illuminate a windmill that survives on the property to help guide her father home when he was out sailing in the evening, said Wilcox.

In 1929, while the deed of the house was held by a mortgage company, flim flam artists used it as a setting for a sophisticated scam, according to research published by historian James Yarnell. He wrote that "a syndicate of self-described bookies rented the house, outfitted it with fake telephones and other apparatus to impart the illusion of a big-time gambling operation."

Wealthy investors were lured from out-of-town by promises they could make huge sums of money on rigged horse races in Florida, according to Yarnell. But after making their wagers and returning to Boothden, they found the mansion empty.

The scam was the inspiration for the 1973 movie The Sting, which starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman and won seven Oscars.

The house was also owned by T.S. Maththews, editor of Time magazine, who married war correspondent and novelist Martha Gellhorn, former wife of Ernest Hemingway, in 1954, Matthews and Gellhorn divorced in 1963."

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