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Mary Polly Bottom was born somewhere between 1790 and 1793. Her husband was Jacob Bottom. She was the mother to Henry Pierce Squire Bottom, who was born on January 9, 1809. She was a double aunt and second mother to Mary Jane (Gibson), Samuel E. and Ambrose A. Bottom. In 1841, her husband Jacob died leaving her a widow. She owned $1,600.00 worth of real estate and $1,000 worth of personal property. She owned a slave dwelling containing two slaves: a fifty-seven-year-old black female and a thirty-two-year-old mulatto female. Her house, which no longer stands, was situated on the west bank of Doctor's Fork, several hundred yards north of her son Henry's house.
During the Battle of Perryville, on October 8, 1862, Mary Bottom, who was sixty-nine or seventy-two years old, continued to live in the cabin located on the west bank of Doctor’s Creek. When Confederate troops crossed Doctor’s Creek to attack the center of the Union lines, they formed near her cabin before moving forward towards the Union foe. After the battle, like most of the homes in Perryville, the Widow Bottom house most likely became a field hospital.
Towards the end of the Civil War and afterwards, Kentucky was plagued with guerilla warfare. Mary Bottoms continued to live alone in her cabin. By this time, she would have been around seventy-six years old. One night on April 10, 1866, Mary was awakened by violent pounding on her door and when she did not open the door, three men kicked open her door and entered her residence demanding money or her life. Terrified, Mary told the guerillas that she had no money in the house, but the men repeated their threats of death unless she came up with some money. She begged the bandits to allow her to say a prayer before she died, and she kneeled beside her bed. The men shot her dead. The guerillas searched her home and did not find any money.
Since the guerillas did not find any money, they left the home. Little did they know, Mary Bottom’s granddaughter was hiding in the large feather bed, watching by the glimmer of firelight in the room, as they murdered her grandmother. When she knew the men were gone, she ran across the fields to the home of Susan Bottom, a neighbor, and told her what had transpired in the home. The entire community was incensed and “had the whole town wild” for justice. Suspicion fell on a man a Perryville resident named Taylor and his two sons Bill and John Taylor. The men had a bad reputation in the neighborhood. Citizens formed a posse and caught the culprits. They were arrested and taken to the courthouse in Danville, Kentucky. The father and two sons protested their innocence. The granddaughter was brought into the courtroom and told to look for the murderers among the crowd of angry men who crowded the room. The granddaughter ran among them, peering up into their faces. When she reached the three prisoners she began to scream frantically and said: “There are the men who killed granny.” The three men were taken to Perryville to be hanged from a tree at the edge of the town’s Hillcrest Cemetery. Somehow, Bill Taylor managed to escape, but he was recaptured and sent to prison. William Linney, a Perryville resident, witnessed the hanging. He wrote: "About 9 o’clock they were taken from the grounds, a rope put about their necks and conducted to the graveyard and hung to a tree that was just over the fence and in front of the church door." John Taylor was hung until dead. When a group of schoolchildren visited the cemetery and found John Taylor’s body hanging from the tree, one of the children promptly fainted.
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