[3] Her first article that called out editorial comment was written from Montreal, Canada, to a home paper in Waynesburg, and copied in the Pittsburgh Post.

With characteristic modesty, she fancied that that letter being signed by her full name, and her father being a prominent politician and a personal friend of the publishers of the Post, they had copied it out of compliment to him only.

She was finally induced, however, to test the merit of her work by writing under a pen name, and sent an article to a Sunday paper in Pittsburgh.

It was a burlesque on the then prevailing fashions, and received so much notice that the editor of the paper advertised for "Meg" to call at the office of the Pittsburgh Dispatch and make herself known.

[6] In the early 1890s, for 14 months, Bayard was in the hospital with her son, Temple, and wrote to earn the money that paid for his bed.

She then overworked so continually that she was often ill.[5] At the close of the Press Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, May 1893, Bayard presented her paper on "Woman in Journalism".

[1] Following a protracted illness, extending over more than a year, her condition had been extremely critical for some time, Mary Temple Bayard Jamison died at Latrobe, August 17, 1916.