[1] Born in Core Creek near Beaufort, North Carolina, he was the son of David Owen and Margaret Ann Tillman Dickinson.
As a young man he was a sailor on a square rigger for two years, before moving to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Co. while attending night high school.
After being associated with the Saugerties Manufacturing Company, Dickinson and Maxwell Becton founded their surgical firm in New York in 1897, and moved it to Rutherford several years later.
It soon became one of the largest surgical instrument manufacturing concerns in the U.S. On December 20, 1916, he married Grace Bancroft Smith (1887–1973) in Rutherford, New Jersey, and in 1919 they had a son, Fairleigh Dickinson, Jr. (1919–1996) who would eventually go on to run his father's company and become a New Jersey state senator.
[2] In 1942, he used his wealth to found Fairleigh Dickinson College, which is today Fairleigh Dickinson University with four campuses, located in Madison/Florham Park, New Jersey; Teaneck/Hackensack, New Jersey; Wroxton, England; and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.