Marshall Hall is located near Bryans Road in Charles County, Maryland, next to the Potomac River, more or less across from Mount Vernon, Virginia, the home of George Washington.

[2] Soon after the Civil War, the site became a highly frequented picnic ground because of its proximity to Mount Vernon.

Steamship lines, originally established to ferry tourists from Washington D.C. and Alexandria to/from Mount Vernon, discovered a new source of revenue in the park across from the historic estate.

Marshall Hall later became one of the first amusement parks in the Washington, D.C., area in the 1890s, offering numerous "appliances of entertainment" (as one deed described them) for visitors who wanted to do more than picnic, many of them arriving by river boat.

Vernon had to be protected and returned to something resembling the days when George Washington sat on his colonnaded porch and looked across the Potomac.