After her brief summer affair with John ended in 1864, Isabel went back to Bowdoin High School in the fall and graduated in 1866.1 Eleven years later, in 1877, she married David Albert Dunbar Jr., a Boston trader.
They had two daughters, Laura born in 1878, a year after they were married, and Sallie (named after Isabel’s mother) born in 1888. The family was relatively happy and prosperous until Dunbar’s business failed, and they had to move in with Isabel’s parents. Dunbar died in 1895. Isabel’s father died a short time later. Isabel was left “plagued” with financial worries and having to cope with taking care of two daughters, an aged mother, loneliness, and depression.2
With little money left her by her husband and father, she sold the house at 916 Beacon Street, where she had lived most of her life, for $7313 and moved to a less expensive suburb of Boston. One of the rare times she is mentioned is a scant notice in 1908 about her attending the annual reunion of girls who had gone to Bowdoin High School.4
Eventually, her daughter Sallie, who had married into money, moved Isabel into an apartment in the Fairfax Hotel in New York where she died eight years later of stomach cancer on February 23, 1927.5
Despite marrying, Isabel had remained faithful to John in at least one way—he had asked her never to show his letters to anyone, and she never did.
After Isabel died, Sallie discovered John’s letters, four photographs of John in a variety of poses, and the pearl ring he had given her. One of the photographs was inscribed “J. W. Booth.” Sallie kept them secret as well until 1930 when she made them public.
Those letters, discussed in chapter twenty, were acquired by Lincoln ephemera collector Louise Taper and were published along with all other surviving letters John wrote in “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me:” The Writings of John Wilkes Booth,6 a book she co-authored with John Rodehamel.7
In 1989, Louise Taper interviewed Isabel’s granddaughter, Bobbie Makepiece, about what, if anything, she remembered about her grandmother. All she was able to recall was that Isabel was relatively short, had blue eyes, and never, ever talked about John Wilkes Booth.8