Mary Todd Lincoln House | |
Location | 578 West Main Street, Lexington, Kentucky |
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Coordinates | 38°3′4.87″N84°30′10.03″W / 38.0513528°N 84.5027861°W |
Built | 1806 |
Architectural style | Georgian |
NRHP reference No. | 71000341 [1] |
Added to NRHP | August 12, 1971 |
Mary Todd Lincoln House in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, was the girlhood home of Mary Todd, the future first lady and wife of the 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. Today the fourteen-room house is a museum containing period furniture, portraits, and artifacts from the Todd and Lincoln families. The museum introduces visitors to the complex life of Mary Todd Lincoln, from her refined upbringing in a wealthy, slave-holding family to her reclusive years as a mourning widow. [2]
The house was built c. 1803–1806 as an inn and tavern, which was called "The Sign of the Green Tree" before its purchase by Mary's father, Robert Smith Todd, for the Todd family. The family moved into the three-story home in 1832. Mary Todd lived in this home until 1839, when she moved to Springfield, Illinois. After their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln visited her family here.
The Mary Todd Lincoln house has the distinction of being the first historic site restored in honor of a First Lady. [3] Operated by the Kentucky Mansions Preservation Foundation, Inc., the house museum was opened to the public on June 9, 1977.
In the mid-1970s, Beula C. Nunn, wife of Governor Louie B. Nunn, along with the Kentucky Mansions Preservation Foundation, Inc., and the Metropolitan Women's Club of Lexington, gained support to preserve and restore the Mary Todd Lincoln House. In June 1996, the Beula C. Nunn Garden at the Mary Todd Lincoln House was dedicated and opened to the public. Today the enclosed gardens contain trees, plants, herbs and shrubs that represent what may have been in the gardens at the Todd home in the early nineteenth century.
The property is open to the public as a historic house museum. [4]
Belle Brezing was a working girl in a bawdy house, run by Jenny Hill, located in this building starting in 1879. [5] Later she became a madam in her own right, with her own brothel. Brezing is widely credited as having inspired Margaret Mitchell's character of Belle Watling in her novel, Gone With The Wind (1936). [6]
Mary Ann Todd Lincoln served as the first lady of the United States from 1861 until the assassination of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, in 1865.
Louie Broady Nunn was an American politician who served as the 52nd governor of Kentucky. Elected in 1967, he was the only Republican to hold the office between the end of Simeon Willis's term in 1947 and the election of Ernie Fletcher in 2003.
Belle Brezing was a nationally known madam in Lexington, Kentucky at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th. Her brothel was known as the "most orderly of disorderly houses".
Lincoln Home National Historic Site preserves the Springfield, Illinois home and related historic district where Abraham Lincoln lived from 1844 to 1861, before becoming the 16th president of the United States. The presidential memorial includes the four blocks surrounding the home and a visitor center.
Ashland is the name of the plantation of the 19th-century Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, located in Lexington, Kentucky, in the central Bluegrass region of the state. The buildings were built by enslaved African Americans, and enslaved people grew and harvested hemp, farmed livestock, and cooked and cleaned for the Clays.
Farmington, an 18-acre (7.3 ha) historic site in Louisville, Kentucky, was once the center of a hemp plantation owned by John and Lucy Speed. The 14-room, Federal-style brick plantation house was possibly based on a design by Thomas Jefferson and has several Jeffersonian architectural features. As many as 64 African Americans were enslaved by the Speed family at Farmington.
Waveland State Historic Site, also known as the Joseph Bryan House, in Lexington, Kentucky is the site of a Greek Revival home and 10 acres now maintained and operated as part of the Kentucky state park system. It was the home of the Joseph Bryan family, their descendants and the people they enslaved in the nineteenth century. Bryan's father William had befriended Daniel Boone and they migrated west through the Cumberland Gap.
Edward Baker Lincoln was the second son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. He was named after Lincoln's close friend, Edward Dickinson Baker. Both Abraham and Mary spelled his name "Eddy"; however, the National Park Service uses "Eddie" as a nickname and the nickname also appears spelled this way on his crypt at the Lincoln tomb.
Riverside, The Farnsley–Moremen Landing is a historic 300-acre (120 ha) farm and house in south end Louisville, Kentucky, along the banks of the Ohio River. The house is a red brick I-house with a two-story Greek Revival.
The Hunt–Morgan House, historically known as Hopemont, is a Federal style residence in Lexington, Kentucky built in 1814 by John Wesley Hunt, the first millionaire west of the Alleghenies. The house is included in the Gratz Park Historic District. The Alexander T. Hunt Civil War Museum is located on the second floor of the Hunt–Morgan House.
White Hall State Historic Site is a 14-acre (5.7 ha) park in Richmond, Kentucky, southeast of Lexington.
Hildene, the Lincoln Family Home is the former summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln and his wife Mary Harlan Lincoln, located at 1005 Hildene Road in Manchester Center, Vermont.
The Dr. Ephraim McDowell House, also known as McDowell House, was a home of medical doctor Ephraim McDowell.
Lexington, Kentucky was a city of importance during the American Civil War, with notable residents participating on both sides of the conflict. These included John C. Breckinridge, Confederate generals John Hunt Morgan and Basil W. Duke, and the Todd family, who mostly served the Confederacy although one, Mary Todd Lincoln, was the first lady of the United States, wife of President Abraham Lincoln.
Anne St. Clair Wright was an American historic preservationist. A central figure in the foundation, in 1952, of Historic Annapolis Incorporated, she served four terms as president and as chairman emeritus of the board. She was responsible for the preservation of the historic center of the city of Annapolis, Maryland. Her preservation work, advocacy and achievements inspired many preservation movements around the United States. She is considered a leading 20th-century American preservationist. Among many civic offices, she served as the director of the Society for the Preservation of Maryland Antiquities; chairman of the board of Preservation Action; was a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Advisory Committee of the U.S. National Park Service; director of the Southern Garden History Society; and a director of the Nature Conservancy.
Antebellum architecture is the neoclassical architectural style characteristic of the 19th-century Southern United States, especially the Deep South, from after the birth of the United States with the American Revolution, to the start of the American Civil War. Antebellum architecture is especially characterized by Georgian, Neo-classical, and Greek Revival style homes and mansions. These plantation houses were built in the southern American states during roughly the thirty years before the American Civil War; approximately between the 1830s to 1860s.
The Civil War Trust's Civil War Discovery Trail is a heritage tourism program that links more than 600 U.S. Civil War sites in more than 30 states. The program is one of the White House Millennium Council's sixteen flagship National Millennium Trails. Sites on the trail include battlefields, museums, historic sites, forts and cemeteries.
E. Belle Mitchell Jackson was an American educator, activist, small business owner, and abolitionist from Danville, Kentucky. Mitchell was one of the founders of the Colored Orphans Industrial Home in Lexington, Kentucky.
Robert Smith Todd was an American lawyer, soldier, banker, businessman and politician. He was the father of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
Mentelle Park in Lexington, Kentucky, is a boulevard district of the Mentelle neighborhood. The district includes 48 residential structures facing Mentelle Park between Richmond Road and Cramer Avenue. Entrances to Mentelle Park at Richmond Road and Cramer Avenue feature limestone pillars. The neighborhood was developed in 1905, and homes in the district were constructed 1906–1934. Four styles of architecture are evident, including American Foursquare, Colonial Revival, Colonial Revival Cottage, and Bungalow. Foursquare and Colonial houses are two stories, and Bungalows and cottages are 1+1⁄2 stories. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.