"I am trying as you will perceive, to make the most of this fearfully wearisome summer," wrote Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1882) from Waukesha in 1872.

"I live in a retired manner in a private house on the outskirts of the town where there are no other boarders, and have all the advantages of the country."

During the 1870s, Mary Lincoln traveled constantly, trying to heal her emotional wounds, restore her finances and escape prying reporters. On July 6, 1872, she arrived at the Waukesha boarding house of Mr. and Mrs. O. M. Hubbard. The local press reported that "poor Mrs. Lincoln carries a heavy heart, and she is much of the time in tears."

"I remember seeing Mrs. Lincoln strolling slowly along the shady sidewalks," Waukesha resident H.M. Youmans recalled years later. "She was always by herself. She looked frail and worn, as one who had been buffeted by many sorrows."

On Aug. 13, the Waukesha Plaindealer reported she had consulted a psychic in Milwaukee: "During the last few weeks she has been holding spiritualistic communion through the most celebrated mediums of the East, and has now opened communication through the operator at Milwaukee."

In mid-August, after touring Madison and Baraboo, she went "up to a wild part of the country." She left Wisconsin at the end of the summer, and spent the rest of her life in a fruitless search for peace.

She died in 1882 in the Springfield, Ill., home where she'd married Abraham Lincoln 40 years before.

-- Wisconsin Historical Society
www.wisconsinhistory.org

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