Mary Ann Bistline Nelson

Mary Bistline Nelson, 92, of Carlisle, died peacefully at Messiah Village in Mechanicsburg on 29 July 2025.

Mary was born October 2, 1932, in Carlisle to the late Clara Drawbaugh Bistline and George Kenneth Bistline. She was the eighth of thirteen children, and with her siblings, grew up in Carlisle, graduating from high school in 1950.

Her warm and outgoing personality quickly won her a job as the receptionist for the then Reeves Hoffman crystal plant where she worked until her marriage in 1955 to Roger E. Nelson II following his graduation from the United States Naval Academy. Her first home away from Carlisle was Newport, Rhode Island. Like all Navy wives, then and now, she was left on her own during ship deployments, sometimes for many months. She found little comfort for her loneliness but found happiness with new friendships in the Navy family community. In her twenty some years as a Navy wife, she was a homemaker under seventeen roofs in eight states, on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Along the way, she raised two daughters, devoted many days of service to military family charity and grew to become a mentor for the younger women who were beginning their own experience in Navy life.

She was gifted, too, in her relationship with little children who, in her presence, literally blossomed like the flowers of her garden. Their nourishment was the security of her manifest love, tempered by a gentle push into the world of discovery. The youngest were not the only ones to benefit by her motherly instincts. For several years, she was a Girl Scout leader who took her tutelage under her wing to teach them the skills of homemaking, self-reliance and the needful qualities of character in becoming young women of gentleness and refinement.

In 1977, the family moved to a forty-acre farm in Carroll County, Maryland, which they named "Springstede" and where, for the next twenty-five years, they raised beef cattle and fodder crops. It was here that Mary's inborn calling came to fruition. If it grew in the ground, she could grow it. All her gardens, and there were many herbs-fruits-flowers-vegetables, bore fruit in abundance. In this life she was a natural. And her enjoyment of farm life was never diminished by the nature of its hard work.

In 2003, the family gave up the farm and returned to its Carlisle roots. Not yet ready to settle down, the Nelsons spent their summer months in the Wisconsin north woods, gardening, boating and fishing at their camp near Eagle River. When in Carlisle, books, hobbies and flowers filled Mary's days. Visits with her many great nieces and nephews were an often repeated source of delight, as was the renewal of old Carlisle acquaintances and school classmates.

Mary was a hobby genealogist who traced much of her family lineage to America's beginnings. She was a life member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a Daughter in the Cumberland Chapter. Her other past associations included the Beta Sigma Phi Sorority and the Mary Dickinson Club.

She now lives in the hearts of her husband, Roger; daughter, Sarah Nelson; son-in-law, Bruce Shingleton… widower of daughter, Rebecca Nelson Shingleton; her grandchildren and great grandchildren, and the many allied kindred of her birth and marriage.

A service celebrating her life will be held soon at Saint Paul's Lutheran Church, Carlisle. Burial will take place at Indiantown Gap National Cemetery on a future date. Flowers, a great joy in Mary’s life, gifted in her remembrance will be happily received as will memorial donations to any child relief charity of choice. Arrangements are being handled by Hollinger Funeral Home & Crematory, Inc., Mt. Holly Springs.