Was this Lincoln conspirator guilty? At this museum, you decide.

NW. (It houses the Wok and Scroll Chinese eatery, filled apiece day at noonday with tourists and feds likewise in seek of a crummy and tasty dejeuner peculiar. There’s a brass almost the building’s story close the strawman doorway.) Mary Surratt — on with Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt and David Herold — was executed July 7, 1865, on a savagely hot day at what is now Fortify McNair, so interred at Setting Olivet Graveyard in Northeasterly Washington. Anna and former relatives afterward were inhumed in contiguous overlooked graves.

O n April 28 , 1865, fortnight subsequently Abraham Lincoln’s blackwash at Ford’s Dramaturgy, Mary Surratt was questioned nether expletive almost her family’s interactions with the president’s grampus, Lav Wilkes Kiosk, at the boardinghouse she ran at 541 H St. NW.

Kiosk “was a fine-looking man and gentlemanlike,” she told the colonel wondering her. “I did not hypothecate he had the daimon he surely demoniacal in his pump.” Historians bequeath always argumentation whether Surratt, the offset charwoman executed by the U.S. administration, was cognizant that Booth’s far-fetched theme to nobble Lincoln to violence the firing of Henchman prisoners of war had morphed into a game to killing him. She was a heartfelt Catholic who had born-again thereto trust in maidhood, says Laurie Brink, conductor of Surratt Menage Museum in Clinton, Md. (so known as Surrattsville), astir 8 miles from the Territory in Prince George’s County.

Surratt professed her naturalness to Founder Jacob Walter hours earlier she mounted the gallows, evening as Lincoln’s replacement, Andrew Johnson, refused to listen her girl Anna’s lachrymose last-minute supplication for her mother’s spirit. The museum — erst the Surratt category tavern and hotel, owned by the Maryland-National Cap Common and Provision Committal — does not issue an functionary rack on the thing, preferring to let visitors strain done innumerable anecdotes and theories that indicate for or against Surratt’s ingenuousness. “Some say she was virginal as the impelled coke, others that she was the heller corporate,” says collections director Lindsey Cornet. “Most say she was someplace in the eye.” For her Collaborator sympathies and her character as emcee to a numeral of Booth’s conspirators, both at the tavern and the boardinghouse, “Surratt is shamed in my psyche eventide if she was alone plotting to abduct the prexy,” contends Harold Holzer, who has scripted legion books on Lincoln, including “The Chairperson Is Injection!” (2004, Calkins Brook Books). “Vicarious liability” laws stipulated that her and early conspirators’ interest in the snatch patch — including her son Lavatory, a Confederative messenger — finally made them blamable in Lincoln’s demise. (Privy was tested in 1867 but loose condemnation.) Chairwoman Johnson is aforementioned to deliver described Surratt as having “kept the snuggle that crosshatched the icky egg,” referring to the boardinghouse, now numbered 604 H St. The tombstone thither now replaced the master, fuddled by vandals decades ago. Incised with a broken-stemmed rosiness, pieces of that offset gravestone consist the noggin of Surratt Theater.

The museum, at 9118 Brandywine Rd., is spread Wednesday done Friday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday noontide to 4 p.m. Access is $5, $4 for seniors, $2 for ages 5 done 18 and release for those jr. than 5. The Fortieth anniversary of the porta of Surratt Theatre as a historical menage museum is slated for May 1 . For more data, see pgparks.com .