In January 1741, Henry Middleton married Mary Baker Williams. Mary was the only surviving child and heiress of John Williams, a wealthy landowner, member of the House of Commons and a Justice of the Peace, and Mary Baker, whose family owned a number of plantations on the Ashley River. According to the St. George Parish Register, Mary Williams was baptized on August 7, 1721.

Henry and Mary were wed in Charleston. Included in Mary’s dowry of 2,248 acres was the three-story house on a bluff overlooking the Ashley River that Henry determined should be the family seat – the couple named it Middleton Place. Over the next twenty years of their marriage, Mary bore Henry twelve children, with only seven living to adulthood.

Sadly, Mary did not live to see her children reach adulthood nor grow old with her grandchildren. On January 9, 1761, at the age of forty, Mary Williams Middleton died and was buried at Middleton Place.