A 1916 advertisement in Scribner's Magazine promised campers experience with backcountry camping, boating, swimming, horseback riding, dancing, music, drama, and field athletics. Jobe owned a boat that she used to take campers to Mystic Island (now called Ram Island (Connecticut)) in Fishers Island Sound. In 1921, Jobe purchased the southern half of Mystic Island, and later bought the rest of the island. In addition to giving girls first-hand experience with the outdoors, the camp was visited by famous explorers and naturalists of the day such as VIlhjalmur Stefannson, Herbert Spinden, George Cherrie, and Martin and Osa Johnson. The fee for campers in 1923 was $375. In a brochure for the camp, Jobe wrote that "girls find health, happiness and their highest development out-of-doors, where they leave behind them the artificialities of towns and cities for the joyous realities of the wooded hills and seashore." Another stated that "girls of today have a right to freedom, health, and happiness." Although she did not describe herself as a feminist or suffragist, she has been so identified by others, and she declared herself to be "very much in sympathy with the [suffrage] movement." The camp closed in 1930 due to the Great Depression. She remained the camp's director throughout its existence. In 1920, fellow explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson introduced Jobe to naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley. Akeley was married to Delia Akeley at the time, but Mary and Carl began an affair. Delia and Carl concluded a bitter divorce in 1923, and Jobe married Akeley on October 28, 1924, at All Souls Episcopal Church in New York City. He was deeply involved with a project to collect specimens for a new Africa exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, and she wrote later that he expected Mary to abandon her own work and devote her time to his African project. Although she described this as "startling," she largely complied. In 1926, she accompanied him on his fifth expedition in Africa (and her first) to collect specimens. On the trip, known as the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition, he became sick on Mount Mikeno of the Belgian Congo and died of a fever. She completed the expedition, mapping parts of the Belgian Congo as well as Kenya and Tanzania, and collecting plant specimens, taking hundreds of photographs. Upon her return to the United States, the museum named her to be her husband's successor as the Special Adviser to the development of their African Hall, a role she held until 1938.