Book chronicles Kingston’s most illustrious street

Edwin Booth.

The McEntee connection to Edwin Booth could be one of them.

As detailed in Thing’s book on West Chestnut Street, Jervis McEntee, like many other rich Kingstonians, had important connections to New York City and often traveled there. McEntee had a studio in New York where he sold his paintings and entertained patrons, friends and prominent personages. Among the latter was one of the country’s leading actors, Edwin Booth.

Booth and McEntee met and socialized in the mid-1860s during the Civil War. Both came to Kingston late in 1864 where Booth convinced him to register for the first time, enroll as a Republican and vote for Abraham Lincoln.

Booth, after disowning his brother John Wilkes, left the New York stage after the assassination in April, returning the following January. His whereabouts during that period are largely undocumented.

Could his friend Jervis McEntee have offered the beleaguered actor, “brother of the murderer,” sanctuary at his inconspicuous home at the end of West Chestnut Street?

Thing says there is no record of it, not even in McEntee’s faithfully kept diary.

But imagine Booth and McEntee standing on the ridge behind “the homestead” and observing Lincoln’s funeral train lit by huge bonfires on both sides of the river heading north on the east side to Albany, to the slain president’s last resting place in Springfield, Il. Imagine what might have been going through Booth’s mind, or for that matter, McEntee’s.