Mary "Minnie" Steele Scales (née Lord) was born in Salisbury (Rowan County), North Carolina on January 30, 1840. As a teenager, Scales attended Saint Mary's School in Raleigh and features prominently in the diary of friend and classmate Margaret Eliza Cotten Engelhard. She married Nathaniel Eldridge Scales in May 1861 and died in Salisbury on October 16, 1919.