Desha Breckinridge

Desha Breckinridge (August 5, 1867 – February 18, 1935) was the editor and publisher of the Lexington Herald from 1897 to 1935. In 1898, he married Madeline McDowell, who became nationally known as Madeline McDowell Breckinridge. He was a brother of Sophonisba Breckinridge and the son of William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, a member of Congress from Kentucky and a lawyer. His grandfather was the abolitionist minister Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, and his great-grandfather was John Breckinridge.

Early life Desha Breckinridge was the son of Issa Desha and William Campbell Preston Breckinridge. His siblings who lived past infancy were Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866–1948), Mary Curry Breckinridge (1875–1918), and half-sister Eleanor Breckinridge Chalkley (1862–1943). Tutored by James Lane Allen as a young man, Breckinridge attended State College (now University of Kentucky) in 1880–81, before he graduated from Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton University in 1889, and studied for the bar at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. Along with his older sister Sophonisba Breckinridge, he passed the Kentucky bar exam and joined his father's law firm, Breckinridge & Stanley. He served as an aide-de-camp to his uncle, Major General Joseph Cabell Breckinridge Sr., during the Spanish–American War. The newspaper grew in circulation and quality with such great writers as Cora Wilson Stewart and well-respected Kentucky scholars such as Samuel Wilson and Charles Kerr.

Breckinridge co-founded the Fayette Home Telephone Company in 1899, and he invested in land deals both in the Bluegrass and eastern Kentucky. They lived together at her home, Hinata, on the edge of Lexington.

Death He died after a long illness on February 18, 1935, and is buried in the Lexington Cemetery.