She was born Mary Ann Ball on July 19, 1817. Her father was Hiram Ball, a descendant of Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower. Her mother, Ann Rogers, descended from one of the oldest families in the State of New York and some of those men had fought in the Revolutionary War. Hiram Ball was a farmer in Knox County, Ohio. Mrs. Ball died in a fire before Mary Ann was two years old. The little girl was raised by her grandparents and an uncle.

She received a basic education for the time and developed a strong sense of duty. Her religious belief was complete. She had a strong constitution, plenty of energy and a practical mind. Early in life Mary Ann may have had some training in herbal medicine.

In 1847 Mary Ann married Robert Bickerdyke, a widower with three children. After living in several states, the family came to Galesburg in 1856. Mr. Bickerdyke died in 1859 and his wife was left to raise her two sons and a step-daughter. The family lived on the west side of Prairie Street two doors south of Waters Street. She advertised herself in the 1860 City Directory as a botanic physician. Mostly, she took in laundry and nursed patients in their homes.

Shortly after the Civil War broke out in April, 1861, a letter was received by the Reverend Edward Beecher, who was pastor of the First Congregational Church on the east side of South Broad Street. The letter described the filthy and disease-ridden army camp at Cairo, Illinois, where about 500 Galesburg men were camped. The members of the congregation decided to send food, clothing and medical supplies with a person to assess the situation. Mrs. Bickerdyke was nominated and she took the  supplies to Cairo.

Mrs. B. proceeded to clean up the camp and provide fresh food and clothing for the troops. She asked the church for $10 a week to buy food and medicine. Her first concern was “her boys.”

Through the rest of the war, she followed Grant’s army, and later General William T. Sherman’s army to take care of the wounded after nineteen major battles. She served on hospital ships which carried the wounded to military hospitals in the North. She operated diet kitchens in the regimental hospitals as well as laundries. She hired contrabands, the name which was applied to slaves who had escaped from the plantations of the South, to work in the laundries. She restored a smallpox hospital which had been abandoned, near Memphis, so the contagion could be kept under control. Previously, men had been sent there to die. Mrs. Bickerdyke cleaned up the facility with the help of the men who had survived smallpox.

She set up three hundred field hospitals during the course of the war and made sure her boys were washed, fed, kept warm and comforted. She suffered the same privations as the men from cold, hot, rainy and windy weather. She had no use for low ranking officers unless they behaved themselves.

At one point, an old white horse was captured from the Confederates. The animal had been worked hard and not fed nearly enough. Nurse Bickerdyke cleaned the horse’s sores and fed him. She rode “Ole Whitey” from battle to battle for the rest of the war. She also road the horse in the Grand Review held in Washington, DC, at the end of the war. She rode down Pennsylvania Avenue beside General John A. Logan, at the head of the Fifteenth Corps.

Mrs. Bickerdyke cared for wounded soldiers until March 16, 1866. She was 49 years old at the time and needed a job so she could finish raising her two sons. She continued her humanitarian work in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Kansas. She died November 8, 1901, in Bunker Hill, Kansas. A funeral was held there and the remains were escorted to Galesburg by members of the Grand Army of the Republic. A second funeral was held in Central Congregational Church with burial next to her husband in Linwood Cemetery.

Less than a month later the Mother Bickerdyke Memorial Association was organized by the Woman’s Relief Corps, an affiliate of the Grand Army of the Republic, in Galesburg. The monument on the grands of the Knox County Courthouse was the result of the work of these women.

By the time the monument was dedicated in 1905, Carl Sandburg was living and working in Chicago. He was considering a life on the lecture circuit and was still trying to find his way to writing poems of worth.