Beech Tree News Network

While circling the Rochester Cemetery and approaching the “Y” on the back side, pull off to read the monument to Dick Todd, who had a local as well as a national connection. Three local historians, William McClellan, Howard Willis Vaughn and Roger Givens have each included the local legend of Aunt Chaney and Dick Todd in their writings about the town of Rochester.

William McClellan writes,

  “Aunt Chaney Todd, who was a slave ofLexingtonbanker, Robert Todd, the father of Mary, who married Abraham Lincoln, was bought from the Todd family and brought toRochesterby Ebenezer C. Guest.” He continues, “Aunt Chaney was the mother of Uncle Dick Todd, who drove the carriage in which Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd rode to their wedding. I remember Uncle Dick was a small wiry man with a goatee and a deep bass voice who drove an ox team in my boyhood days.”

In the Howard Vaughn account, he says that Dick Todd also went by the name Lon (Louis) Dickerson.

While a search of the history of the Todd and Lincoln families has not turned up any collaborating story of Todd being the driver, the story has been accepted in Rochesterhistory for years.  And now it is etched in stone.

For further reading, try these books:  That Last Boat in the Evening, by William McClellan 1976; Rochester, by Howard Willis Vaughn; African-American Life In Butler County, Kentucky, by Roger Givens (Green River Ramblin’s Publishing 2013)

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Story by Roger Southerland, for Beech Tree News.