Mrs. Kennon was born three weeks after the Battle of New Orleans, and several months before the Battle of Waterloo. Her life spanned the period of the great advance in the appliances of civilization in this and the last century. It was very important that the news of the battle of Waterloo should reach London without delay, and yet with every appliance and speed then known, it took three days for the news to reach England. Indeed, when Mrs. Kennon was thirty-two years of age, it required eight months to travel from New England to Oregon. At the age of fifteen she could have been a passenger on the first passenger railroad train that was ever run; until she was five years old, there was no such thing as an iron plow in all the world, and until she was grown up, the people were dependent on tinder boxes and sun glasses to light their fires. She had reached the age of twenty-three years when steam communication between Europe and America was established, and when the first telegram ever sent passed between Baltimore and Washington she was still a young woman. If all the advances in civilization which took place during the lifetime of this remarkable lady were catalogued, they would make a singularly interesting list. Mrs. Kennon was left a widow when less than thirty years of age, with her one child, Martha Custis Kennon. To Mrs. Kennon and her daughter Mrs. Thomas Peter bequeathed Tudor Place, having long survived her husband, and her other children having received their inheritance. Martha Custis Kennon married her cousin, Dr. Armistead Peter, the son of Major George Peter, and so the original surname came back to the place, which has never been out of the one family.