OLIVE POND AMIES.
AMIES, Mrs. Olive Pond, educator and lecturer, born in Jordan, N. Y. She was two weeks old when her father died, and the mother and child went to the home of the grandparents in New Britain, Conn. There the mother worked untiringly with her needle for the support of herself and her two children. The older child, a boy, was placed in the care of an uncle, and to Olive the mother took the place of father, mother, brother and sister. When Olive was four years old, the mother and child left the home of the grandmother and went to the village to board, that Olive might be sent to school. Soon after this the mother married Cyrus Judd, a man of influence in the town of New Britain. Olive continued in school for many years. She passed through the course of the New Britain high school, was graduated from the State Normal School, and later, after several years of teaching, was graduated from the Normal and Training School in Oswego, N. Y. She was always a leader in school and became eminent as a teacher. She has for many years given model lessons at conventions and institutes. For five years in the State of New York and two in the State of Maine she was in constant demand in the county teachers' institutes. She founded the training school for teachers in Lewiston, Maine, and graduated its first classes. In 1871 she was married to the Rev. J. H. Amies, pastor of the Universalist Church, Lewiston, Maine, though she had been brought up a Methodist and had become, in later years, an Episcopalian. In 1877 she began to edit the primary department of the "Sunday School Helper," published in Boston, the exponent for the Universalist Church of the of the International Lessons. Since January, 1880, she has never failed with a lesson, excepting two months in 1884, during a severe illness. The Rev. Mr. Amies is a student, a man of original thought, and in full sympathy with the advanced questions of the day. Mrs. Amies feels that his encouragement and assistance have been the moving power in her work. They have constantly studied together and stood side by side in sympathy and work whether in the pulpit, on the lecture platform, or in the home. She holds State positions in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Woman Suffrage Association, and delivers lectures on the different themes connected with those two organizations. She also speaks on kindergarten and object-teaching, and her "Conversations on Juvenile Reforms" have been exceedingly popular wherever given. Her home is now in Philadelphia, Pa. She has had a family of six children, three girls and three boys, of whom one son and one daughter died while young.