George Alfred Townsend

George Alfred Townsend (1841–1914) was an American journalist and author who wrote under the pen name Gath. Born in Delaware and raised on the Delmarva peninsula, he became one of the youngest war correspondents of the Civil War, covered the assassination of Lincoln and the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, and afterward reported on Washington politics for newspapers across the country for forty years. His novel The Entailed Hat (1884), set among the kidnappers and gentry of the Eastern Shore, is his best-known fiction. At Gapland on South Mountain, Maryland, he built the War Correspondents Memorial Arch, the only monument of its kind.