Little is known of Mary Gordon’s childhood in Hampstead, New Hampshire. Since she was, for a short time, a student at Atkinson Academy where her future husband, Silas, taught in the early 1790s, she was a learned young lady and her letters bear that out. She was among the eldest of a rather large family and since her parents were elderly and losing their health, it was expected that she would live at home and take care of them. This worked for many years until Silas Dinsmoor, a U.S. Agent for the Choctaw, returned from Natchez, Mississippi to propose to her in 1806. Initially she accepted, but then a host of friends—and her parents—began to voice their objections to the match, which would take her far from New Hampshire to the Mississippi Territory, a place that was still rather sparsely settled by European Americans. He complained to Mary’s brother, John Gordon, that the neighbors had “been exciting ungrounded alarms & terrors, respecting the distance, the horrors of a wilderness, the continual fear of savage beasts, & more savage men, the deprivation of all social intercourse and friendly connection, & raising doubts as to my own integrity.”1 When Silas discovered that his bride-to-be was having second thoughts, he chided her, “It is the fixed decree of nature that the purest happiness is found only in the married state, & for this cause, the sexes abandon their nearest connexions (sic), & leave father & mother, to assume a new relation, & discharge their duty to God & society.”2 No doubt casting his own happiness as a religious and civic duty was intended to appeal to Mary’s nature.

The couple was married in the summer of 1806 and by the fall Mary who had remained in Hampstead, was pregnant. Silas, who had returned to the Mississippi Territory, wrote her letters that were meant to entertain her by detailing his drinking habits, but apparently they failed to amuse her. The final letter to include a mention of his drinking began,

Some months have elapsed since I have advised you of any paroxysms of my inebriety. I found the information was not pleasing to you, or perhaps rather the fact on which the information was founded excited your disapprobation. I can now assure you that I have not been drunk since I came last home [to the agency], & one reason assignable is, I have had nothing intoxicating to drink! I only state this as matter of fact, not intending to excite your pitty (sic), nor sympathy.3

In early June of 1807, Silas Gordon Dinsmoor was born. To distinguish him from his father and his cousin, he was referred to as “Silas G.” That fall, Silas returned to New Hampshire to collect his wife and son and they all made their way by horse and buggy to the agency house on the Natchez Trace.

Whatever Mary’s initial impressions of her new home, she made friends quickly with whomever was in the area – mostly the wives of military men. Her husband was rarely home since his job required him to travel around to the various Choctaw villages, so Mary was happy to have two relatives stay with her – Nancy and Sam Smith. At some point, Silas began to purchase African Americans to work his land for him and Mary would have been left to manage this labor force. But the isolation surely told on her, especially with young children to raise. In 1809, John Gordon was born and the other children followed every other year – an infant son who was born and died in 1811; little Mary, who was born in 1813 and died at the age of nine; Martha Eliza who was born in 1815 and died ten years later, and finally, Thomas H. Williams Dinsmoor, who was born in 1817. Later in life, Mary remarked to her son that she had lost five of seven children, so there may have been a miscarriage or another infant death somewhere in those years.

The fortitude with which she faced these troubles is indicative of her religious faith and emotional strength. Her belief, which was shared by many, was that death spared a child from the sadness and troubles usually encountered in life. She was also comforted by the belief that all her loved ones would be reunited someday in Heaven. When John Gordon died from yellow fever while Silas was away, she wrote him of the event,

Yes, dear Silas, our beloved Gordon, our Child of early & much promise was suddenly called, in the full pride of youth & Manly beauty, from the fleeting joys of this delusive World! It has pleased the All Wise dispenser of events, to spare him the many trials that have awaited us; & have, perhaps, taken him ‘from evil to come.’4

Gordon had died in Mobile – one of the cities the family had lived in since moving from the Agency house in 1813. Tired of moving around, Mary wrote to her son, Silas G., “I am ambitious only for some little spot whereon to ‘make the wilderness blossom’ where we might, in a few years, point out to our friends, and the passing traveler, our Garden, our Vineyard, & Orchard & say, this with the blessing of heaven, is our work.”5 James Dinsmore, her nephew, suggested Ohio, and Silas decided to follow that advice – perhaps he had heard that the Ohio Valley near Cincinnati had plenty of vineyards. Silas G. followed his parents to Cincinnati and found a job with a mercantile establishment there and soon he was married to the sister of a prominent stove-maker, Elizabeth Sarah Resor. It was Sarah who, with her sisters and mother, sewed the “Broken Star” quilt that now lies on the bed in the large corner bedroom on the western side of the Dinsmore house.

Silas was only in Cincinnati to take his bearings and find where the good, but cheap, land was located. He settled on Belleview Bottoms, a few miles downriver in Boone County, Kentucky. His acreage included an island in the river known as Loughery Island, but which he called Grape Island. He hired Jenny, and enslaved woman with children, to help Mary with housework and some farming chores. It is likely that Thomas and Silas did much of the actual field labor. Nothing is known about the house that Silas and his family lived in, but it has been described as a cabin and when he died in 1846 there were not a lot of possessions to be inventoried.

Mary and Silas wrote to James and Martha Dinsmore to encourage them to move to, or at least visit, Kentucky. They were finally able to persuade their relatives to buy a piece of land only a mile away. Now Mary had someone very close by to visit with and chat with about womanly concerns. The move was fortuitous for Thomas, too, who eventually married the woman who tutored James’ daughters, Isabella, Julia, and Susan Dinsmore, Eugenia Wadsworth, from New York. Five years after James and Martha became neighbors to Silas and Mary, Silas died and was buried on a hill above James’ house, in what became the family graveyard.

Mary continued living on the farm that Thomas inherited. Silas G. still lived in Cincinnati and visited his mother often with his family. One daughter survived from this marriage and her name was Lydia Isabella Dinsmoor. Born in 1838, this young girl visited often with her Kentucky kin. Known as “cousin Belle,” by James Dinsmore’s daughters, she was orphaned by 1849. Her mother died in December of 1842 and her father died during the cholera outbreak in 1849. When she married Dr. McHenry Raymond in 1871, she chose to have the wedding ceremony in the parlor at James’ house. Belle died in 1921 and is buried at Spring Grove Cemetery with her mother and father.

Thomas and Eugenia Wadsworth were married in 1848. They eventually had at least six children, five of whom reached adulthood. Little Mary Gordon (Molly) was their eldest and she died before her second birthday. She was followed by Silas, Lavinia, Gordon, and Martha (Mattie), and Herbert who died when he was ten. All but Mattie were born in Kentucky; she was born in Missouri where the family moved sometime in the 1860s. They settled on the Gaines Farm in Saline County, which James and Thomas owned as partners. Thomas lived in the large farmhouse and oversaw the tenants who farmed the property, sending a portion of the income back to Kentucky. As Julia later found out, though, Thomas became obsessed with inventions and wasted much of the farm money on hopeless ideas.

In 1854, Mary Gordon Dinsmoor died. Little is known of the circumstances of her death, but she would have been seventy-seven years old—a long life for the mid- nineteenth century. Probably, Martha Dinsmore insisted that Mary stay at her home to be nursed. She was buried next to her husband and near her granddaughter, Molly. Her strong faith readied her for death: “May we all bear in mind who it is that has laid his hand...heavily on us, & be prepared for a reunion with our dear departed friends in that world, where ‘the wicked cease from troubling, & the weary are at rest.’”6