Her great-grandfather, Robert Cunningham, of Virginia, was a soldier of the war for Independence, after which he removed to Tennessee, thence to Alabama, and thence to Illinois, when still a Territory, and there manumitted his slaves.

By the time she was nine years old, she encountered the dangers of a frontier home, when her father went forth to fight in the Mexican–American War, and braved the miner's life in the Sierra Nevada of California.

Mary relieved her mother, who was not strong, of most of the household work, while attending the primitive school of the neighborhood, and trained herself in needlework.

She remained with him in Washington until the outbreak of the American Civil War, when he resigned his seat in Congress to return to Illinois to go into the service of his country.

When the army entered upon the Tennessee River campaign, Mrs. Logan again returned to her home, but was soon shocked by the news from Donelson that her husband had fallen at the head of his charging columns, dangerously wounded.

At Memphis, in the winter of 1862–3, Mrs. Logan again joined her husband, now a general, and remained there until he led his troops in the campaign which ended in the surrender of Vicksburg.

President Benjamin Harrison appointed Mrs. Logan one of the women commissioners of the District of Columbia to the Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893).

[10] The family residence, "Calumet Place," Washington, in which both Gen. and Mrs. Logan died, was a new and long-desired home at the time of his death, but unpaid for.

The first thing she did was to secure the homestead, and in it devoted what was once the studio of an artist and former owner to a "Memorial Hall," where all the General's books, army uniforms, portraits, busts, presents and souvenirs of life were gathered to form an interesting collection.

[3] She gave the collection of memorials, trophies and souvenirs of her husband and of her only son, Maj. John Alexander Logan Jr., who was killed Nov. 11, 1899, at the Battle of San Jacinto, to the State of Illinois.