Mary Ann Ball was born near Mount Vernon, Ohio in 1817 and married Robert Bickerdyke in 1847 before moving to Galesburg, Illinois. At the outbreak of the Civil War, after Galesburg residents purchased $500 in medical supplies for soldiers at Cairo, Illinois, she offered to deliver the money and used the supplies there to establish a hospital for the soldiers. She spent the rest of the war traveling with various Union armies, establishing more than 300 field hospitals for sick and wounded soldiers, risking her life during battles to search for the wounded, and carrying a lantern into the contested ground between armies after dark to retrieve them. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman admired her bravery and concern for soldiers, and she also gave many speeches across the North about soldiers' difficult conditions to solicit contributions. Soldiers nicknamed her "Mother Bickerdyke" for her continuing concern for them. After the war ended in 1865, she worked for the Salvation Army in San Francisco, became an attorney helping Civil War veterans with legal issues, and cared for wounded soldiers at the Home for the Friendless in Chicago, where she saw many young disabled veterans without careers needed work. Hearing of homestead land in Kansas, she went to Salina in 1867, built a boarding home that could sleep 33 and feed 110, secured two years of free CB & Q Railroad transportation for veterans and their families, and helped settle more than 300 families in and around Saline, Barton, Russell, Lincoln, Ellsworth, Ottawa, Stafford, and Rice Counties. She lived with her son James in Bunker Hill from July 1877 to December 1888 and again from 1896 until her death, and in Russell from 1888 to 1894, where James served as Superintendent of Schools and she made daily rounds to visit and advocate for homebound and sick veterans, including nursing one veteran from San Francisco in her home until his death from cancer. The first home she ever owned was given to her in Bunker Hill on her 80th birthday by local veterans she had served. The Kansas State Historical Society honored her in 1895, and in 1897 the Woman's Relief Corps named its Ellsworth facility for her humanitarian service. When she died on November 8, 1901, at age 84, memorial services were first conducted in Bunker Hill by the G.A.R. Post there because Kansas members considered her one of their own after 34 years in the state, and her remains were then taken by rail to Galesburg, where she was buried in Linwood Cemetery beside her husband Robert and infant daughter Martha. On May 22, 1906, a bronze monument in her memory was unveiled in Galesburg before an estimated crowd of 8,000. In 2010 she was named a finalist in the 8 Wonders of Kansas People contest sponsored by the Kansas Sampler Foundation.