Marshall Hall, Maryland

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Marshall Hall, Charles Co., Maryland

Marshall Hall, Maryland is the site of the Marshall family mansion. Marshall Hall is located in Charles County, Maryland, next to the Potomac River, more or less across from Mount Vernon, Virginia, the home of George Washington. The home was one of the finest built on the Maryland shore of the Potomac in the early eighteenth century. The Marshall family were minor gentry and owned as many as 80 slaves by the early 1800s. Soon after the Civil War, the site became a highly frequented picnic grounds. Washingtonians fled the summer heat of the city for all sorts of events at the picnic grounds, from exclusive catered events to popular cultural events such as a swimming exhibition given by the daredevil Robert Odlum in the summer of 1878, seven years before his death at the Brooklyn Bridge. Marshall Hall later became one of the first amusement park in the Washington, DC area in the 1890s, offering numerous "appliances of entertainment" (as one deed described them) for visitors who wanted to do more than picnic. By the early 1900s, annual jousting tournaments took place at the site. New attractions were added throughout the twentieth century, and gambling became a major draw for a while after World War II. Between 1949 and 1968, Marshall Hall and a handful of nearby sites offered the only legal slot machines in the United States outside of Nevada. The National Park Service gained control of the park after Congress mandated that the views from Mt. Vernon had to be protected and returned to something resembling the days when George Washington sat on his porch and looked across the Potomac. The Park Service tore down all vestiges of the amusement park in the late 1970s. A fire destroyed much of the colonial house soon after, and in the early 2000s a truck driver slammed his rig through the remaining hulk.