In 1872 Martha C. Badgett, a descendant of one of the pioneer families of Tennessee and the daughter of Campbell Badgett, was married to James Alexander (Alec) Henson (1847–1909). J. A. Henson was a founder of the extremely successful Haynes-Henson Shoe Company and had far-reaching business assets. Upon his death, Martha Henson personally managed her considerable financial holdings and was known as a quiet benefactress to many good causes.
In 1888 she and her husband had been signers of the charter of St. John’s English Lutheran Church, the first English-speaking Lutheran congregation in the city, and both were active members of the church. Church membership grew, and the congregation wished to build a church larger than the old Broad Street Methodist Episcopal Church building, which it had purchased in 1890. In 1910 Martha Henson donated a lot one block from the location of the church, and the church bought a second lot. Ground was broken for the church in 1911, and by the time the church was completed in 1913, Martha Henson had donated, as a memorial to her late husband, nearly $90,000 of the $100,000 cost of the Gothic Revival, architectural-style church designed by Knoxville architect R. F. Graf.
It was Martha Henson who assured that the Williams-Henson Home for Boys became a reality. Elbert Williams had decided to leave his 600-acre farm to the Lutheran Church to “be used perpetually for the establishment of a Home and School for Delinquent Boys,” but around 1915-18, several people in Knox County, including Williams, lost nearly everything to a swindler. He appealed to his brother’s sister-in-law, Martha Henson, for assistance. Her help allowed him to retain 167 acres of the farm, including the farmhouse; and at his death in 1925, the home he had envisioned and named the Williams-Henson Home for Boys in his will, came into being.
Martha Henson made a bequest to UT that, at the time the will was made, was valued at $200,000. The effect of the Depression upon the value of property, however, decreased the value of her total gift to UT to $63,000, and the funds were used for construction of Henson Hall.
She and J. A. Henson are buried in Old Gray Cemetery in the mausoleum she had had constructed for them. In the rear of the cemetery, the Knoxville Journal and Tribune (September 27, 1909) called it the “handsomest mausoleum that has been erected in the state of Tennessee.” It is now sealed because of an act of vandalism in which unknown individuals broke in, opened the caskets, and placed the bones of the Hensons around the cemetery.