In the dark hours before dawn on April 16, 1865, two men on horseback reached a farmhouse off what is now Bel Alton Newtown Road and knocked. The house belonged to Samuel Cox. The men were John Wilkes Booth and David Herold, four days into their flight from Washington. Cox took them in, then arranged for them to be concealed in a nearby pine thicket for several days while Union troops searched the county.
That house is still standing. This year, for the first time in a generation, its front door is open to anyone who wants to walk through it.
Historic Rich Hill, at 9135 Bel Alton Newtown Road, finished its interior restoration in early 2026 after years of work led by the Historical Society of Charles County and its Friends of Rich Hill committee. Since the first weekend of April, the site has run free public tours Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with guides on hand to walk visitors through the house's history, its architecture, and the rehabilitation itself. Donations are welcome. Admission is not required.
If you've driven past it your whole life without knowing it was there, you're not alone. The house sits a mile and a half off Route 301, easy to miss unless you're looking for it.
One of Two Houses Built This Way
Here's the detail that separates Rich Hill from every other old farmhouse with a historical marker out front: it's one of only two known houses in the entire Charles and St. Mary's County region built originally as a two-story dwelling using this particular floor plan. The other is Marshall Hall. Everywhere else, builders used this same layout for one-story homes. Whoever built Rich Hill around 1729, believed to be Dr. Gustavus Brown, decided to stack a second full floor on top of it, and that upper level still holds much of its original 18th-century framing, including doors and trim that predate the American Revolution.
That's not a small thing for a restoration team to preserve. The work at Rich Hill kept the original fireplace mantels intact, restored the second-story pine flooring rather than replacing it, and repointed the brickwork using a lime mortar mix matched to samples pulled from the original walls. The roof went back on in historically accurate red-painted steel rather than whatever was cheapest or fastest. None of that is visible from the road. All of it is why the Historical Society kept calling this a rehabilitation rather than a renovation.
The most recent public funding request tells you how granular this got. Charles County approved $13,422 last year to cover permits and engineering for new front and back steps and a handicap ramp, a small fraction of the roughly $63,000 in grants the Historical Society has pulled together for Rich Hill overall. They weren't rushing to open a photo backdrop. They were finishing a building.
"Rich Hill belongs to the people of Charles County."
That's Historical Society President Debi Scoggins, describing the reopening after years of work.
Three Histories, One Roof
Most of what gets written about Rich Hill leans on the Booth connection, because it's the most marketable story and it's the one with a historical marker and a spot on the published Booth Trail tour guides. It's a real piece of the house's history. It's also not the only one, and this restoration didn't treat it that way.
Walk through the finished interior and you'll find the restored parlor and the Samuel Cox Jr. bedroom furnished to look like they did in the 19th century, alongside a Dr. Brown Gallery tracing the house's earlier Founding-era connections. Margaret Brown, born at Rich Hill, later married Thomas Stone, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Her brother, Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, went on to become one of George Washington's physicians and helped care for him during his final days. That's a different era of American history sitting in the same building as the Booth story, and now it has its own dedicated exhibit space.
The third thread is the one that's easiest to leave out entirely, and the restoration didn't. More than 100 enslaved men, women, and children lived and worked at Rich Hill from the early 1700s until slavery ended in Maryland in 1864, in the tobacco fields, inside the house, and in the roles that kept a working plantation running. The house now includes an Enslaved African American Exhibit and a "Behind These Walls" interpretive space built around exactly that history. On September 19, the Historical Society is holding "Say Their Names: Remembering the Enslaved African Americans at Historic Rich Hill" at 1 p.m., a program built specifically to give that history its own moment rather than a footnote inside someone else's tour.
That's the thing worth knowing if you already live here and have driven past this house a hundred times without stopping. This isn't a reopening built around one dramatic night in 1865. It's a restoration that made room, deliberately, for three overlapping histories that usually don't get told inside the same four walls.
What's Actually on the Calendar
If you want to see it for yourself, here's where things stand as of this month:
The Grand Opening Ceremony happened June 27, and the "250th Celebration: Living History at Historic Rich Hill" ran July 11 with the 1st Maryland Regiment of the American Revolution in period reenactment, tying into the country's semiquincentennial. Both are behind us now, but they're proof this calendar has been real and on schedule all year, not a soft announcement that fizzled.
The next one is the September 19 program described above. Outside of scheduled events, the house is open every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through the season, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with the last tour starting at 3:30. No tickets, no reservation, just show up.
What Else Is Sharing the Calendar This Month
Rich Hill isn't the only thing giving this stretch of Route 301 a reason to slow down this September. A few miles up the road in La Plata, the Charles County Fair runs its 102nd year September 17 through 20 at the Charles County Fairgrounds, the same grounds that have hosted this fair since 1924. Four stages, a carnival midway, livestock and 4-H exhibits, and the annual crab cakes alongside the usual fair food. The fair's Friday and Saturday line up with Rich Hill's regular open hours that same weekend, including the Sept. 19 program, so both are within reach of a single Saturday. Come December, the same fairgrounds host the Kris Kringle Christmas Market, now in its 14th year, with handmade crafts from more than 180 local artisans.
Bel Alton has one more building worth knowing about while we're on the subject of restorations that took years longer than anyone wanted. The former Bel Alton High School, a 1938 building that operated as a segregated school for Black students until Charles County integrated its schools in 1966, is the only historically Black high school building in the county whose original structure survived fully intact. Alumni fought off a planned demolition in the late 1980s and eventually raised more than six million dollars to restore the building, which operated as a community center from 2008 to 2015 and now houses the Alumni Association alongside county and state offices. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It's not on the same tour schedule as Rich Hill, but it sits in the same small town, carrying its own piece of the county's history forward.
Bel Alton has spent a long time being the place people pass through on the way to somewhere else, a strip of motels and small businesses along Route 301 that mostly served travelers rather than destinations. This year, for the first time in a long time, it has a reason for people to actually turn off the highway. Not for one story. For three of them, finally told under the same roof.
If Rich Hill's reopening has you thinking more about the history sitting quietly around Bel Alton, or you're simply curious what a house like that says about the neighborhood surrounding it, I'd love to talk through what else is happening in this corner of Charles County. Reach out to Samantha Bowling anytime.
