Born February 8, 1840 at Hancock's Bridge, Salem County, New Jersey to Thomas Yorke and Rachel (Nicholson) Hancock, she was the fourth child and third daughter in this Quaker family. She answered a call for nurses, but was the only one of the group not to be accepted to become a volunteer nurse. Nonetheless, she found her way to Gettysburg and began what became a well known and respected service as a nurse in the field. At age 23 she was quickly immersed in the horrors of war, which she relayed to her relatives in descriptive, heartfelt letters. After only days of helping the wounded at Gettysburg, Hancock wrote her sister, "I feel assured I shall never feel horrified at anything that may happen to me hereafter."
"It took nearly five days for some three hundred surgeons to preform the amputations that occurred here, during which time the rebels lay in dying condition without their wounds being dressesd or scarcely any food... The Air is rent with petitions to deliver them from their suffering," the compassionate nurse wrote of the wounded and dying. While helping at Gettysburg, Hancock described her own conditions: "I am as ... dirty as a pig and as well as I ever was in my life - have a nice bunk and tent about twelve feet square. I have a bed that is made of four crotch sticks and some sticks laid across and pine boughs laid on that with blankets on top. It is equal to any mattress ever made."
Hancock’s skills as an organizer as well as her ability to raise supplies made her a very valuable nurse. In mid - 1864 large numbers of wounded called her south to Virginia. Hancock grew totally disgusted by the carnage wreaked by General Grant’s tactics, writing, "The idea of making a business of maiming men is not worthy of a civilization."
After Gettysburg, Hancock turned to work among the Black refugees crowding into Washington. Although disapproval was expressed from home because she lived alone among men at the field hospitals, she defended her unconventional way of life vigorously and courteously, saying that she would "do nothing rash or romantic." The culmination of her army duty came as she stood on the reviewing stand in Washington to watch Sherman's victory parade.
She returned to her sister's home in Philadelphia after the war. Then the Philadelphia Friends Association for the Aid and Elevation of the Freedmen sent her to South Carolina where she founded a school (later known as the Laing School) at Mt. Pleasant. She begged family, government agencies and the Friends Association in Philadelphia for books, seeds, tools, cloth and money. Finally, 200 children were enrolled at the school. These children, in contrast to Hancock's pupils back home, were eager to learn and a delight to teach. Hancock and her coworkers were not welcome among the white southerners. She and her supporters and coworkers were not stopped however and she remained at Mt. Pleasant as principal of the Laing School until 1875.
Suffering from dyspepsia, headaches and hemorrhages Hancock left the Laing School and returned to Philadelphia in 1875. A short rest seemed to renew her energy and she was soon off to England to study philanthropic social work. Returning to Philadelphia she helped form the Society for Organizing Charity in 1878 (later the Family Society of Philadelphia) and the Children's Aid Society of Pennslyvania.
In 1884 Hancock and her friend Edith Wright led a movement to prove that good management could create a healthful as well as profitable community in Wrightsville, a squalid neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. Hancock and Wright made rules for the residents, repaired buildings, pressured city bureaus for paved streets and police protection, enforced rules of clenliness and order, placed an effective principal in the school and even initiated the opening of a public library with books in both English and German. By 1914 all the residents of Wrightsville were homeowners, a triumph of the crusade.
During her last years, Hancock lived with a niece in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she died of nephritis on December 31, 1927 at the age of 87. Her ashes are burried at what is now known as Cedar Hills Friends' Cemetary in Harmersville, New Jersey near her birthplace.
