George Alfred Townsend (January 30, 1841 - April 15, 1914), was a noted war correspondent during the American Civil War, and a later novelist. Townsend wrote under the pen name "Gath", which was derived by adding an "H" to his initials, and inspired by the biblical passage II Samuel 1:20, "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askalon." Townsend was born in Georgetown, Delaware, on January 30, 1841.[1] He originally wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and in 1861 he moved to the New York Herald. He is considered to have been the youngest correspondent of the war. In 1865, Townsend was Washington correspondent for the New York World, covering the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath. His daily reports filed between April 17 – May 17 were published later in 1865 as a book, The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth, reprinted in 1977.[2] Immediately following the war, he married Elizabeth Evans Rhodes of Philadelphia. He established and edited, with former Civil War general Abram S. Piatt, the Capital at Washington, D.C., in 1871. [3] In 1884 Townsend began building a baronial estate in the Catoctin Mountains called Gathland (or "Gapland"), near Burkittsville, Maryland. Gathland was built on the site of the Battle of Crampton's Gap, and is in close proximity to the battlefields of South Mountain and Antietam. The estate was comprised of several buildings, including Gapland Hall, Gapland Lodge, the Den and Library Building, and a mausoleum (notable for its inscription of "Good Night Gath"). In 1896, Townsend built the War Correspondents' Memorial Arch, the first such monument to war journalists. His novels included The Entailed Hat (1884), which fictionalized a true story of a woman named Patty Cannon who kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Townsend's other works include the short story collection Tales of the Chesapeake (1880) and the novel Katy of Catoctin (1887).[1] The Gathland estate is now Gathland State Park. Several buildings still stand, including Gapland Hall (which is the park headquarters) and the mausoleum. Townsend left Gathland in 1911, and died three years later in New York City. He was buried in Philadelphia.