She attended the fashionable Misses Hebb's School in Wilmington and travelled extensively before she married wealthy textile businessman Henry Burling Thompson.

"[4] Thompson bought a lot on Park Avenue in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, from Irénée du Pont and constructed a large two-story summer home there in 1927 she dubbed Mon Plaisir (French, "my pleasure").

Thompson enlisted Governor C. Douglass Buck to create two Civilian Conservation Corps camps at Lewes and Slaughter Beach to eradicate the mosquitos and their habitat.

[8] Historian Richard B. Carter wrote “Had she lived in a slightly later age, she could easily have won election to high political office (had she wished to pursue it).

She was a paradox of the passing of the Victorian era from Delaware.”[9] Mary Wilson Thompson died on April 2, 1947, at her home Brookwood Farm in Greenville, Delaware.

[1] Her son James Harrison Wilson Thompson became a Thai silk magnate and disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Malaysia in 1967 and was declared dead in 1974.