ELLSWORTH -- On a lonely windswept hill, a small cemetery looks down on the town of Ellsworth.
It’s named in honor of the woman who soldiers during the Civil War called “Mother.”
Mary Bickerdyke redefined the Victorian roles of women. Nurse, lawyer, comforter — she rallied and inspired those around her.
During the Civil War, she became a national hero with soldiers affectionately nicknaming her “Mother,” or “Cyclone in Calico.”
The Bickerdyke Home Cemetery near Ellsworth is a lasting tribute to a woman who believed that cleanliness and compassion were the cure for almost everything that ailed you.
“She herself was a widow and had two sons off to war … In delivering of aid, she gets there, she sees the conditions and the situations in these Civil War camps,” said Ken Spurgeon,
Civil War and Kansas historian, film producer and assistant professor at Friends University.
“She saw the lack of cleanliness and challenges that existed in these camps.”
Soon after the war started, Bickerdyke volunteered to take supplies and aid from her hometown in Illinois to soldiers on the battle front. Once she saw the conditions, she took action.
“Her brain is going, and of course, she is a mother, but it’s much bigger than that,” said Spurgeon, who calls Bickerdyke one of his favorite Civil War characters.
“She had an incredible amount of drive, in addition to intelligence. We have to understand this is a period when women aren’t yet nurses. Men are nurses during the Civil War … she’s seeing how she can serve and how she can help the cause.”
On the battlefields, Bickerdyke soon established laundries and kitchens. She dressed wounds and chastised Army surgeons for their uncleanliness.
She became an agent of change – not only in health care but in women’s rights.
“Before the whole thing is over, there is going to be hundreds -- I’ve seen terms like 200 or 300 – (of) hospitals that are pretty much started by Mother Bickerdyke,” Spurgeon said. “And she’s right there on the scene during 18 or 19 campaigns, including Vicksburg and Chattanooga and Atlanta and the March to the Sea.
“She was just the ultimate helper. And she didn’t need a medical degree to do it. She didn’t need to be technically a nurse. She was … the greatest nurse of the Civil War.”
For some men, Spurgeon explained, that became a problem.
“She gets into trouble because she was probably pretty forceful,” he said. “Several of the officers did not like her nosiness.
“The story goes that some of the military commanders go to Gen. (William Tecumseh) Sherman and say they need to control … this woman who keeps interjecting herself in all these things and the response is, ‘She outranks me.’ ”
That attitude served her well even after the Civil War when she came to Kansas. She was an advocate for war-weary veterans who decided to start their lives over in Kansas.
“Eventually one of her sons moves to Kansas, which is the beginning of her moving to Kansas just four or five years after the war,” Spurgeon said. “That’s really what got her to Kansas.
“She becomes now Mother. She’s Mother forever because all these veterans remember her, and she works in different aid societies.”
Bickerdyke brought hundreds of Union soldiers and more than 300 families to Kansas following the war, temporarily earning Kansas the nickname “The Soldier State.”
And now, her legacy is reflected at the Mother Bickerdyke Memorial Cemetery. It holds 32 women who were Civil War nurses, widows or daughters of Civil War veterans.
They died between 1902 and 1919 and were residents of the nearby Mother Bickerdyke Home in Ellsworth.
Bickerdyke died on Nov. 9, 1901, in Bunker Hill, Kansas. She’s buried in Galesburg, Illinois, where she lived and worked before the war.
All the stones at the Bickerdyke Cemetery are marked with the same cross. A larger stone lists all the names of the women buried there.
It’s in tribute to a woman once called a Cyclone in Calico.
If you go: The address of the Mother Bickerdyke Memorial Cemetery is 1278 14th Road near Ellsworth.