"Yours respectfully, "MRS. STEPHEN BARKER."
Very few individuals in our country are entirely ignorant of the beneficent work performed by the Sanitary Commission during the late war; and these, perhaps, are the only ones to whom the name of Amy M. Bradley is unfamiliar. Very early in the war she commenced her work for the soldiers, and did not discontinue it until some months after the last battle was fought, completing fully her four years of service, and making her name a synonym for active, judicious, earnest work from the beginning to the end.
Amy M. Bradley is a native of East Vassalboro', Kennebec County, Maine, where she was born September 12th, 1823, the youngest child of a large family. At six years of age she met with the saddest of earthly losses, in the death of her mother. From early life it would appear to have been her lot to make her way in life by her own active exertions. Her father ceased to keep house on the marriage of his older daughters, and from that time until she was fifteen she lived alternately with them. Then she made her first essay in teaching a small private school.
At sixteen she commenced life as a teacher of public schools, and continued the same for more than ten years, or until 1850.
To illustrate her determined and persistent spirit during the first four years of her life as a teacher she taught country schools during the summer and winter, and during the spring and fall attended the academy in her native town, working for her board in private families.
At the age of twenty-one, through the influence of Noah Woods, Esq., she obtained an appointment as principal of one of the Grammar Schools in Gardiner, Maine, where she remained until the fall of 1847. At the end of that time she resigned and accepted an appointment as assistant in the Winthrop Grammar School, Charlestown, Massachusetts, obtained for her by her cousin, Stacy Baxter, Esq., the principal of the Harvard Grammar School in the same city. There she remained until the winter of 1849-50, when she applied for a similar situation in the Putnam Grammar School, East Cambridge (where higher salaries were paid) and was successful. She remained, however, only until May, when a severe attack of acute bronchitis so prostrated her strength as to quite unfit her for her duties during the whole summer. She had previously suffered repeatedly from pneumonia. Her situation was held for her until the autumn, when finding her health not materially improved, she resigned and prepared to spend the winter at the South in the family of a brother residing at Charleston, South Carolina.