Mary was born in Philadelphia to George and Eleanor Draper, recent immigrants from Ireland. In 1748, while Mary was still a teenager, her family moved to Virginia and established a settlement on Stroubles Creek near present-day Blacksburg. In 1750, Mary married William Ingles and the couple had two sons. Things went well until the outbreak of the French and Indian War. On July 8, 1755, a party of Shawnee allied with the British raided Draper's Meadow. Four men were killed. Mary, her sister-in-law Betty Draper, Mary's son's Thomas and George, and two adult men were captured. The two men died from running the gauntlet and the other members of the group were split up as the Shawnee made their way back to their base at Shawneetown, near the junction of the Ohio and Scioto Rivers. 
Not sure whether her children or her sister-in-law were alive or dead, Mary made herself useful to her captors by sewing shirts from trade cloth. The Shawnee paid her in trade goods for her work. In October, 1755, she was taken to the Big Bone Salt Lick near present-day Big Bone, Kentucky. There, in late October, she and another woman slipped out of camp with nothing but blankets, moccasins and tomahawks to begin the arduous journey home. She realized that her best chance of finding a White settlement and help was to follow the network of rivers in the area. They kept to the Ohio River, and at its junction with the Licking River near present-day Cincinnati, found an abandoned cabin with corn. From there, following the Ohio, Kanawha and New Rivers while fording others such as the Licking River, Big Sandy, Little Sandy, Twelvepole, Guyandotte, Coal, Paint and Bluestone, over 140 rivers and streams in all. At one point, when their crossing place was too deep, the two women constructed a crude raft to make it across.
As the weather turned colder and food supplies ran out, Mary's companion began talking about killing and eating her and made two attempts on Mary's life. Mary decided to go it alone as they reached the New River on or around November 26, 1755. She eventually came to the cabin of a Settler she knew named Adam Harmon, near what is now Pembroke, Virginia. Mr. Harmon returned for the other woman, and took her to a nearby fort, where she joined a wagon train for Pennsylvania. Mary was reunited with her husband, William, whom she had feared dead from the Shawnee attack, but who had fled into the wounds severely wounded and survived. The couple had four more children. They established the Ingles Ferry over the New River, along with a blacksmith shop and tavern, hoping they would get word of their two boys someday. They lived out their lives in the cabin shown here.George died in captivity but Thomas, who'd been taken at age 3, spent over thirteen years with the Shawnee, becoming fully acculturated. He was eventually returned to White society and his family, where he had to learn English all over again. Later, he would fight against the Shawnee during Lord Dunmore's War (1774). He served in the American Revolution and, years later, when his own wife and children were captured in a raid, he went looking and got them back.
Betty Draper, Mary's sister-in-law, eventually wound up with the Cherokee. Years later, her husband and Mary's brother, attended a council with the Cherokee and John Draper found out that his wife was with the band of one of the leaders present. He arranged a ransom and retrieved Betty. The family's story was passed down through letters and oral tradition, but has been the subject of several novels and a 1995 TV movie "Follow the River".
In addition to her cabin being preserved, a statue of Mary stands outside the Boone County Public Library. A memorial made of chimney stones was erected over her grave in West End Cemetery in Radford, Virginia, and Radford University named one of its buildings Draper Hall in her honor. There is also a bridge, a portion of a highway and other points in the general area named for her.
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