Abraham Lincoln's Obese Miss Mary Owens Fiance

Obesity did not just begin in our modern fast food times. There have been obese humans, for almost ever, likely starting soon after God chased Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Well over a couple centuries ago there was this American named Abraham Lincoln. Eventually he would become very famous with a wife named Mary Todd.

Before Lincoln married Mary Todd he was engaged to another Mary. Miss Mary Owens.

Lincoln had fallen deeply in love with one Ann Rutledge, she being the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde daughter of a New Salem saloon-keeper. In 1835 Ann suddenly died, sending Lincoln into grief so deep his friends feared he might kill himself.

Still grieving a year later, Lincoln agreed to marry, sight unseen, Miss Mary Owens, she being a well-to-do Kentucky spinster who was the sister of one of Lincoln's New Salem friends.

Lincoln later described what he thought upon first seeing Miss Mary Owens.

"I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. I knew she was called an 'Old Maid,' and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of that appellation, but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother, and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit of its contracting into wrinkles, but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy and reached her present bulk in less that thirty-five or forty years, and, in short, I was not at all pleased with her. But what could I do? I had told her sister that I would take her for better or worse, and I made a point of honor and conscience in all things to stick to my word, especially if others had been induced to act on it, which in this case I had not doubt they had, for I was now fairly convinced that no other man on earth would have her, and hence the conclusion that they were bent on holding me to my bargain."

It took Lincoln over a year and a half to convince Mary Owens that life with him would be a living hell. Lincoln went into celebration mode when, in 1838, Mary Owens decided not to marry him.

The image I found of Miss Mary Owens must have been made long before she reached the size she was when Abraham Lincoln agreed to marry her.