Educated at the Thurston School in Pittsburgh and then at Briarcliff College, she started her benevolent work raising funds for the city's Industrial Home for Crippled Children.
[2][3] She engaged in a wide variety of philanthropic activities throughout her lifetime supporting more than 250 organizations including the Red Cross, The Home for Convalescent Mothers and Babies, the Pittsburgh Symphony Society, the YWCA, the Twentieth Century Club and many others.
Her involvement in this successful campaign drew national attention with one North Carolina paper reporting "Woman's Hand Directs Crushing Blow, Wrecks Political Machine.
[1] She continued to work with a number of Republican organizations and to support campaigns including that of Presidential hopeful Alf Landon against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.
Mary Flinn married John Lawrence, an employee of the London and Liverpool Globe Insurance Company who had ties to her father's construction firm, in 1914.
[8] In addition to the trust, at the time of Mary's father's death in 1924, she received a large inheritance that she used to fund the purchase of the Hartwood property where the family built a Tudor mansion and riding stables.
This large estate with formal gardens and riding trails encompassed several hundred acres and was eventually purchased by the Allegheny Parks Commission and was opened for public use in 1976.
Her personal papers, including an extensive collection of letters chronicling both Pittsburgh life and World War I, are held at the Heinz History Center.