She was the daughter of John C. Breckinridge. Desha studied for a short time at the school now known as the University of Kentucky and taught at a private school she opened with her mother. Also while in Sitka she whipped a student, and his father and others went to the school board to complain.
This may have helped lead to the end of corporal punishment in Alaskan public schools.
Later she had a job with the Lexington public school system until December 1885, when she began work as a clerk in Washington, District of Columbia In 1888 she began teaching in Sitka, Alaska. She wrote to the government in Washington about the poor living conditions of the Alaskan natives, which resulted in a federal investigation. A note appeared in the Tacoma Ledger in January 1889, stating, "The Board of Education of Alaska has abolished flogging in the public school.
In 1889 she went back to Lexington, but soon went to Washington to work as a clerk in the pension office, and later worked as a copyist for the Office of Indian Affairs.
Foreign the rest of her life she continued working in the civil service, as well as acting as an Assistant Director of the Daughters of the American Revolution Hospital Corps during the Spanish–American War in 1898. The first Daughters of the American Revolution chapter began on October 11th, 1890, at 2 p.m. at the Strathmore Arms, the home of Mary Smith Lockwood, who was one of its four co-founders.
The other founders were Desha, Eugenia Washington (a great-grandniece of George Washington), and Ellen Hardin Walworth. Sons of the American Revolution members Registrar General Doctor George Brown Goode, Secretary General A. Howard Clark, William O. McDowell (Sons of the American Revolution member #1), Wilson L. Gill (secretary at the inaugural meeting), and 18 other people met at the Strathmore Arms that day, but Desha, Lockwood, Walworth, and Washington are called co-founders since they held two to three meetings in August 1890.
After Desha"s death the first memorial service ever held in Memorial Continental Hall was held for her by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The Mary Desha Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution is located in the District of Columbia.
A memorial to the Daughters of the American Revolution"s four founders (including Desha), located at Constitution Hall in Washington, District of Columbia, was dedicated on April 17, 1929. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who sculpted it, was a member of Daughters of the American Revolution.
