Robert and Mary surrounded themselves with family in their summer home. Their eldest daughter, Mamie, and her husband, Charles Isham, and their son, Lincoln, known as Linc, bought their own house in Manchester Village, but they gathered at Hildene for family events.

Linc played with his younger cousins Peggy and Bud Beckwith, Jessie’s children from her first marriage to Warren Beckwith. The children had a reflecting pond where they sailed boats, a playhouse, a tepee at the edge of the woods, and they rode ponies on the property.

As young teens, Peggy and her friend Mary Porter liked to hike through the woods, study flowers, and canoe or fish along the Battenkill River.

Life at Hildene

Mary hosted dances, dinners, and birthday parties for her family. A highlight of Bud’s seventh birthday party was when all the children rolled down Hildene’s long, grassy hill behind the house. The next day, Mary, the thoughtful hostess, sent her chauffeur to pick up the guests’ stained party clothing so she could have them laundered.

Robert conducted Pullman Company work from his Hildene office but also took time out for his hobbies. He loved golf and practiced the sport on Hildene’s lawn when he was not playing at the Ekwanok Country Club. He and fellow Ekwanok board members Robert Janney, George Thatcher, and Horace Young became the well-known “Lincoln Foursome” on the golf course. Robert also golfed with William Howard Taft, who visited him at Hildene, both during and after Taft’s presidency.

The Lincolns had a large staff of maids, a cook, a butler, gardeners, animal grooms, a chauffeur, and a farm manager. Our archives do not reveal details about Robert’s relationship with the employees, but Mary held weekly tea parties for them and gave them birthday and Christmas gifts.

Robert and Mary enjoyed Hildene together for twenty-one years. On July 25, 1926, Robert went for a Sunday drive in Manchester in his 1925 Rolls-Royce, which Mary had given him for his 82nd birthday. He ate dinner that night with Mary, Bud, and Peggy and was in good spirits. During the night, however, he died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Two days later, Manchester lowered its flags to honor Robert, and Mary held a simple funeral ceremony at Hildene. Only immediate family and two surviving members of the Lincoln Foursome and their wives attended. Reverend D. Cunningham-Graham, pastor of the Congregational Church of Manchester, read bible passages that included the 23rd Psalm, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar.” Robert’s grandsons were among the pallbearers who carried the casket from the house to the waiting hearse. The funeral procession traveled one mile to the arranged transportation for his final burial at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia.

Hildene remained in the Lincoln family for another fifty years. Mary spent her summers in Vermont until she died in 1937. She willed Hildene to her granddaughter, Mary Lincoln “Peggy” Beckwith, who never married or had children. Peggy lived full-time at Hildene and enjoyed the property as much as her grandparents did.