[5][6] She was raised in Fitchburg with her siblings: Harriet Alice (1825–1887), who later married Luke Wellington; Ann Elizabeth (1827–1844); Charlotte Hoar (1829–1891); Hannah Fidelia (1831–1882), who later wed Charles James Frye; James Burgess (born 1833), who died in the Utah Territory while in service with the 2nd California Cavalry; Abby Sophia (1835–1914), who later married Joel Willard Sheldon; Edward Monroe (1837–1921); George Henry (1841–1894); William Waldo (1843–1880); and Albert Greenwood (born 1845), who died on November 11, 1845, at the age of 7 months, and was laid to rest at the Laurel Hill Cemetery in Fitchburg.

[13] Widowed by him soon thereafter while he was traveling abroad,[14] she also sustained another loss in 1863 when her father passed away in Fitchburg at the age of 60 on September 30, and was laid to rest at the same cemetery – Laurel Hill – where her youngest brother had been interred 18 years earlier.

[15] Already greatly respected for her abilities as an educator and administrator by the time she was 24 years old, she was offered the job of vice-principal of the newly-established Vassar College in 1863, which she declined, choosing instead to pursue further training in Europe.

[17] Upon her return to New York during the fall of 1867, she was awarded the position of acting principal of the Van Norman Institute, one of the city’s elite and most successful boarding schools.

[21] Making Italy their home base for three years, they ventured forth on periodic excursions, including a voyage along the Nile River aboard a Dahabeah during the winter of 1872–1873, during which she wrote her poem "If We Had But a Day".

[22] Tragically, she was widowed a second time when her husband, John B. Dickinson, died suddenly of a stroke on March 16, 1875[23] while on a stopover in Chicago en route to San Francisco.

"[31] In addition, she wrote about the lives and work of: Charles Kingsley, Harriet Martineau, George Sand, and others; edited The Open Window, a magazine produced by convalescing patients and other invalids by the Shut-in Society; served as an associate editor for the philanthropic magazine published by Edward Everett Hale and his Lend a Hand Society;[32] contributed "A Tour Around the World" to the November 1882 edition of Chautauquan;[33] and penned “Women of the Period” for Harper’s Bazaar.

[34] During the mid-1880s, Mary Lowe Dickinson became active with other prominent women in the planning and launch of a new philanthropic organization, the International Order of the King’s Daughters and Sons.

[35] Gradually garnering national attention for the organization and for herself in newspapers nationwide, she was invited to speak at the Dansville Water Cure during the late 1800s.

Other prominent women and men who lectured or received care here included: Bronson Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth.

In times of conflict they are the keenest sufferers, and while the nation’s honor is dear to them, whatever tends to settle disputes by reason and law, rather than by warfare, demands their heartiest indorsement.

Therefore, we ask you, without delay, to write personally to your senators, to hold meetings, to send petitions and to aid by all means in your power, the completion of this great act of Christian civilization.The treaty referred to in this letter was an agreement between Great Britain and Venezuela “to provide for an amicable settlement of the question which has arisen between their respective Governments concerning the boundary between the Colony of British Guiana and the United States of Venezuela.”[42] During the opening decade of the new century, Mary Lowe Dickinson suffered another series of financial and legal setbacks, this time resulting from her agreement in 1904 to purchase an expensive set of books due to a mistaken belief that she was creating a sound investment opportunity.

On her return her attorney, Melvin H. Dalberg ... procured the setting aside of the judgment by Justice Guy in Special Term, Part I., and a new trial was ordered.During the June 16, 1909, deposition process for that new trial and the actual trial itself on June 21 it was revealed that Mary Lowe Dickinson had initially agreed to purchase the company’s $2,500 edition of the books, but had been pressured into changing her order to a substantially more expensive one by a representative of the Quimby Company who had convinced her that she could earn a $500 profit if she re-sold it to “a woman in West Virginia who would ultimately rebuy the books from her,” but that the books had not even been ready for delivery to Dickinson and could not have later been resold because the purported buyer from West Virginia had never existed.

Following funeral services on June 11 at the Methodist Episcopal Church at 60th Street and Madison Avenue, she was laid to rest during a private interment ceremony at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, where her husband had been buried in 1875.