Mendenhall, Dorothy Reed, 1874-1964

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, circa 1903

Dorothy Mabel Reed Mendenhall, born in Columbus, Ohio on September 22, 1874, was the second daughter and third and youngest child of Grace Kimball and William Pratt Reed and an important link in a long lineage of prominence and privilege. All four of Mendenhall's grandparents' families--the Kimballs, the Reeds, the Talcotts, and the Temples--traced their origins back to New England in the 1630s. Mendenhall was particularly proud of the fact that the Reed family could document its direct descendence from Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke and their daughter, the poet, Anne Bradstreet, who came to Massachusetts Bay on the Arabella in 1632, and that her Talcott relatives were direct descendents of John Talcott. He had arrived had in Cambridge in 1632 and, in 1636, built the first house in Hartford, Connecticut. Her great-grandfather Richard Kimball surveyed parts of the Northwest Territory after the American Revolution and was paid for his services with grants of land. He, in turn, passed along forty acre plots of land in Cleveland, Canton, and Columbus, Ohio to his sons. By the mid-nineteenth century the Kimballs, were prominent figures in Ohio politics and society. Mendenhall's maternal grandfather, Hannibal Kimball, made his fortune in shoe and boot manufacturing. Her father William Reed joined Hannibal Kimball in his business in 1858 and, in 1867, married his eldest daughter. Mendenhall spent her early years living with her parents, her sister Elizabeth, her brother William Reed Jr., and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins on the Kimball estate on the East side of Columbus. When William Reed Sr. died from complications of diabetes and tuberculosis in 1880 he left an estate worth several hundred thousand dollars.

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