Mary Bird Nichols was part of the early Adventist movement.
She was married to Otis Nichols, a lithographer connected with production of the 1850 prophecy chart.
The Meeting of November 18, 1848
On November 18, 1848, Mary Bird Nichols and her husband Otis Nichols hosted a small gathering of believers at their home in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Among those present were James White, Ellen White, and Captain Joseph Bates.
During that meeting, Ellen White went into vision.
What she received was a direct charge to James White: he was to begin publishing a paper. The vision described that the paper would be small at first — but that it would grow and grow until its light went clear around the world.
James White obeyed. He launched The Present Truth in 1849, a small journal printed under difficult conditions and mailed to scattered believers across New England and beyond. That paper was later combined with Advent Review in 1850 to become the Second Advent Review and Sabbath Herald — the periodical that would travel the globe and help transform a fragmented post-disappointment movement into an organized, publishing, worldwide church.
The articles published in The Present Truth — read the original: The Present Truth (PDF) — were among the first doctrinal anchors of what would become Seventh-day Adventism.
The meeting in the Nichols home on that November evening was, in retrospect, one of the founding moments of the Adventist press. Mary Bird Nichols opened her home for it.