William H. Herndon, Jesse William Weik, Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Etiam in minimis major, The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln by William H. Herndon, for twenty years his friend and Jesse William Weik

A lady friend¹ says she was “handsome, truly handsome, matronly-looking, over ordinary size in height and weight.”

A gentleman² who saw her a few years before her death describes her as “a nervous, muscular woman very intellectual, with a forehead massive and angular, square, prominent, and broad.”

At the time of her advent into the society of New Salem she was polished in her manners, pleasing in her address, and attractive in many ways. She had a little dash of coquetry in her intercourse with that class of young men who arrogated to themselves claims of superiority, but she never yielded to this disposition to an extent that would willingly lend encouragement to an honest suitor sincerely desirous of securing her hand, when she felt she could not in the end yield to a proposal of marriage if he should make the offer. She was a good conversationalist and a splendid reader, very few persons being found to equal her in this accomplishment. She was light-hearted and cheery in her disposition, kind and considerate for those with whom she was thrown in contact.

One of Miss Owens' descendants is authority for the statement that Lincoln had boasted that “if Mary Owens ever returned to Illinois a second time he would marry her;” that a report of this came to her ears, whereupon she left her Kentucky home with a pre-determination to show him if she met