Portrait of Abigail Oldham Churchill, circa 1845

Portrait of Abigail Oldham Churchill, circa 1845

Abigail Oldham Churchill came from a lineage of wealthy and prominent early Louisvillian settlers. She was just two years old when her father, Colonel William Oldham, died in the Battle of Wabash. Her mother, Penelope Pope, a twenty-two-year-old widow with four children, remarried into the Churchill family. In 1802, two weeks after her fourteenth birthday, Abigail married Samuel Churchill, her step-father's twenty-four-year-old brother. She gave birth to their first child when she was fifteen and had a child almost every other year over a span of thirty years. She had her last of fifteen children when she was forty-four years of age.

The Filson Historical Society Museum Collection, Louisville, Kentucky

1984.18.1