English: Grave of Mary Surratt in section 12 at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C., in the United States in 2014.

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins was born near Clinton, Maryland, in 1820 or 1823. She married John Harrison Surratt in 1939, and they had two sons and a girl. The adopted son of a somewhat wealthy landowning family, Surrat purchased a tavern and inn in Clinon (then known as Surratsville), as well as a townhouse in Washington, D.C. The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, and John Surratt died in August 1862 from a stroke. Mary Surratt moved into the D.C. townhouse -- which she lease out as a boardinghouse -- and the Surrattsville tavern.

The Surratt boardinghouse was used as a meeting place by John Wilkes Booth and others to plot to kill President Abraham Lincoln. For her role in the plot, Suratt was hanged on July 7, 1865. She was buried in the prison yard of the Washington Arsenal (now Fort Lesley J. McNair). In February 1869, President Andrew Johnson turned the body over to the Surratt family. Mary Surratt was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C., on February 9, 1869. Two of her children, Isaac and Anna, were buried on either side of their mother in unmarked graves.

Mary Surratt's grave was marked initially with a rectangular reddish stone which read "Mrs. Surratt". This headstone was defaced and deteriorated by the 1960s. In 1968, Harrison Weymouth (a descendant of the famous Snowden family of Prince George's County) obtained permission to erect a new headstone. A brass plaque affixed to a granite stone was place at the front of the headstone, which read: "Mary Eugenia Jenkins Surratt. Widow from Surrattsville, Prince George's County, Maryland, swept by events and emotions surrounding the assassination of Lincoln from obscurity to the limelight of a military trial and inglorious death on a scaffold, and whose guilt in the conspiracy is still questioned." The pieces of the original marker were given to the Surratt House Museum.

The ostentatious plaque was removed at some point in the 1980s or 1990s by the Surratt Society. So was the nearby shrine, which had yet another plaque, with a poetic inscription.