Popes Creek Travel Guide

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My son wanted his children to experience eating hard crabs, so my DIL said they wanted us to go to lunch and eat crabs. She did not understand what this involved. Mostly eating crabs means steamed hard crabs, and I felt that the children wouldn't have enough patience or my DIL enough skill to get enough to actually eat that way.

So we went up the road to Robertson's where we had gone before and where I thought I had liked the crab cakes. I particularly remembered the wonderful ladies rooms that they had. (see photo)

We were seated at a very long table in a window booth covered with brown paper. All the furniture moved so if you were fat, you could move the table so you would have more room.

They may be closed November 1 to March 1.

Favorite Dish: My son and my husband split a dozen hard crabs and my granddaughter ate some of the claws. (I think she liked hitting them with the hammer more than eating them though.) The hard crabs are market price which is currently $29.95/ dozen and they were very good.

The two children split a chicken tender basket which was $9.95. It had 5 large pieces of chicken and very nice fries. They asked for honey mustard sauce and were given something that was made on site which they didn't care for since it wasn't what they were used to. (I don't care for mustard so I didn't check on it.)

My DIL had cream of crab soup (she gave a little to each kid) $4.95 for a cup, and portabello crab appetizer $7.95 which looked very good.

I had an a la carte crab cake $ 9.95 and cinnamon fried apples $1.50 as a side. I was a disappointed in my crab cake as there was less lump crab meat in it than I remembered.

Lunch on Thursday isn't a particularly busy time for them, but the food came very quickly and was really hot, and the waitress was very attentive and brought us everything we asked for quickly.

The total bill was $69.75. With 5% tax and tip the charge on the credit card was $87.24.

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Favorite thing: Tiny Pope's Creek is one of the places on the Maryland Civil War Trails.

After the assassination, Booth and David Herold arrived at Dr. Mudd’s home at 4:00 am the following morning. Dr. Mudd, perhaps not knowing the real identities of his visitors nor that the president had been assassinated, examined Booth’s leg, made a splint and both men retired to an upstairs bedroom. After leaving Mudd's house, the two men holed up while Union soldiers filled the roads in the area the next day, searching for Booth and his companion. Mudd and Herold passed through Bryantown, Pope’s Creek, and eventually managed to cross the Potomac River into Virginia more than a week later.

There is a Civil War Trails sign at the river on Pope's Creek Road south of Route 301 – Booth and Herold, helped by a local guide, arrived at the Potomac River April 20. Their attempt that night to cross at Pope's Creek did not succeed. They became disoriented and ended up on the Maryland side a short distance west of here. The conspirators succeed in crossing into Virgnia the next night.

Fondest memory: When my son wanted to eat hard crabs on his way home to South Carolina, we stopped to eat at one of the Pope's Creek restaurants. At that time, I found out about the connection with the John Wilkes Booth escape route through reading the highway signs.

There used to be a ferry near where the Governor Nice bridge now is. It went from Morgantown, Md. to Mathias Point in Virginia, as early as 1705.

In addition to the photo of Pope's Creek from the water, the pictures show Mathias Point and the Mathias Point spider, the first green marker (number one) north of the bridge at Morgantown, and the Maryland shore as it might have looked in Booth's time.