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.
Miss Bradley returned from Charleston the following spring. Her winter in the South had not benefited her as she had hoped and expected, and she found herself unable to resume her occupation as a teacher.
During the next two years her active spirit chafed in forced idleness, and life became almost a burden. In the autumn of 1853, going to Charlestown and Cambridge to visit friends, she met the physician who had attended her during the severe illness that terminated her teacher-life. He examined her lungs, and gave it as his opinion that only a removal to a warmer climate could preserve her life through another winter, and that the following months of frost and cold spent in the North must undoubtedly in her case develop pulmonary consumption.
To her these were words of doom. Not possessed of the means for travelling, and unable, as she supposed, to obtain a livelihood in a far off country, she returned to Maine, and resigned herself with what calmness she might, to the fate in store for her.
But Providence had not yet developed the great work to which she was appointed, and though sorely tried, and buffeted, she was not to be permitted to leave this mortal scene until the objects of her life were fulfilled. Through resignation to death she was, perhaps, best prepared to live, and even in that season when earth seemed receding from her view, the wise purposes of the Ruler of all in her behalf were being worked out in what seemed to be an accidental manner.
In the family of her cousin, Mr. Baxter, at Charlestown, Massachusetts, there had been living, for two years, three Spanish boys from Costa Rica, Central America. Mr. Baxter was an instructor of youth and they were his pupils. About this period their father arrived to fetch home a daughter who was at school in New York, and to inquire what progress these boys were making in their studies. He applied to Mr. Baxter to recommend some lady who would be willing to go to Costa Rica for two or three years to instruct his daughters in the English language. Mr. Baxter at once recommended Miss Bradley as a suitable person and as willing and desirous to undertake the journey. The situation was offered and accepted, and in November, 1853, she set sail for Costa Rica.
After remaining a short time with the Spanish family, she accepted a proposition from the American Consul, and accompanied his family to San Josè, the Capital, among the mountains, some seventy miles from Punta Arenas, where she opened a school receiving as pupils, English, Spanish, German, and American children. This was the first English school established in Central America. For three months she taught from a blackboard, and at the end of that time received from New York, books, maps, and all the needful apparatus for a permanent school.