Unfortunately, few primary documents exist to assess the women's own perception of their efforts.  A reminiscence by Elizabeth Blanchard Randall provides a rare, illuminating example.  Randall, who supervised the Anne Arundel County effort, spent several days away from her husband, children, and other responsibilities in order to prepare her stands.  Upon his arrival in Baltimore on April 24, her husband "found her very happy as she had been the whole week taking charge of two tables."   Evidently, Mrs. Randall received both the approval and encouragement of her spouse for her soldier relief activities.  Apparently supportive of her volunteer work in Annapolis, she recalled years later, "he insisted on my taking part in an immense fair to raise funds for the Sanitary commission, to which the Ann Arundel table, of which I had the management, was able to contribute $1000."   Elizabeth Blanchard Randall's reluctance to take credit for her actions may stem from the fact that she was writing a complimentary life sketch of her deceased husband, an accomplished Maryland politician.  Yet, even in her modest and limited comments, one can detect the pride of her accomplishment at the fair. 

The Maryland Fair did succeed in fostering both a benevolent and patriotic spirit within the state's loyal populace.  Before the end of the event's run, Baltimore's own African-American community expressed an interest in holding a similar fair for the sake of their own sons in uniform.  "We have heard them express impatience at being held in dependence on their white brethren in this matter" reported The New Era.   Fanny Turnbull and Elizabeth Albert, the wife of the fair's co-chairperson, went on to found the women's Baltimore branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, serving as president and treasurer, respectively.  Each also later served as an officer in organizations caring for the orphans of Union soldiers.  Maryland Fair organizers accounted for two of the seven officers for the Shelter for the Orphans of Colored Soldiers, as well as six of the eight for the Union Orphan Asylum.  Of this latter organization, "under the management of ladies exclusively," many women connected with war-time relief efforts continued to contribute their time and money, even holding small-scale fundraising fairs, throughout the 1870's. 

The women's moral influence and organizational example permeated Baltimore's Unionist society.  Perhaps, as the ultimate compliment, the city's formerly Secessionist women, renown in wartime for their open and clandestine devotion to the Confederacy, organized their own large-scale fair for general southern relief in 1866.  Utilizing the sanitary fair model, their event, also held in the great hall of the Maryland Institute, featured an art gallery and some stands bearing the same names as its 1864 Unionist antecedent. 

In conclusion, Maryland Unionist women drew upon their domestic skills to aid in the physical well-being and morale of U.S. soldiers throughout the Civil War.  The socially acceptable women's traditional roles of providing nursing assistance, making garments, and preparing food served as an extension of their prior domestic and charitable work.  Though barred from the political process, they expressed their devotion to the Federal government through the organization of patriotic activities, thereby buttressing the martial spirit of Union volunteers and civilians participants alike.  The Baltimore Sanitary Fair provided the unique venue to bring together both benevolent and patriotic impulses of the women.  The fair presented them with a different and larger scale organizational challenge, allowing females to stretch, without irreparably changing, the bounds of their traditional domestic sphere.  Enhanced societal roles would still lie years away.  Yet, in a period of over four months, they organized committees,  decided local responses, solicited donations, and prepared items and publications, while all the time juggling their schedules and household responsibilities, for the singular purpose of achieving a successful effort.  The noble nature of their cause allowed women to place greater demands upon men and Maryland's Unionist society without repercussion to their own femininity or personal reputation.  On the contrary, Baltimore's Sanitary fair provided women with a rare opportunity to garner wide personal recognition in a socially acceptable, almost heroic fashion.  As an article from Almira Lincoln Phelps book Our Country extolled:

Never again during our life can such noble opportunities for noble deeds present themselves for women. . . . The female who administers to the dying necessities of the soldier . . . does she not, through her sympathetic nature, expose herself to heart-wounds more cruel to be borne, than the sabre's gash or the fatal shell?