Mary Todd and the Town That Made Her

In eighteen eighteen, on Short Street a few blocks from the courthouse, a daughter was born to Robert Todd, one of Lexington's most prosperous businessmen, and his wife Eliza Parker Todd. They named her Mary Anne. She would eventually be known to history as Mary Todd Lincoln, but long before she was a president's wife, she was a Lexington girl, educated here, shaped here, and made uneasy here.

Mary Todd grew up in a household that was by Kentucky standards enlightened and by any standard wealthy. She attended the best schools in Lexington, including the boarding academy run by a Frenchwoman named Charlotte Mentelle, where the curriculum included French language, literature, and dancing. Mary Todd was a sharp student and an avid reader.

She had opinions and expressed them freely, which was unusual for a young woman of her time and class. She also grew up in a slaveholding household. The Todd family, like virtually every prosperous Lexington family of the era, owned enslaved people who worked in their home.

Two of her half-brothers would fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War, while she sat in the White House beside a president fighting to end the institution that had made her father's world possible. She left Lexington for Springfield, Illinois, in eighteen thirty-nine, eventually married Abraham Lincoln, and returned to her hometown only rarely. The house where she was born no longer stands, but the childhood home she lived in later on West Main Street is preserved as a museum, a small brick house that remembers a life that grew far larger than the town could hold.