Woman of the Century/Marie Augusta Oldham

OLDHAM, Mrs. Marie Augusta, missionary worker, born in Sattara, Western India, in November, 1857. Her maiden name was Marie Augusta Mulligan. Her father was from Belfast, Ireland, and an officer in the British army on service in India. Her mother was born in India and was of the old "Butler" stock, also of Ireland. Her mother was early left a widow, with three daughters and one son to care for. Although accustomed to the ease and luxury of Anglo-Indian life, she was yet a woman of clear judgment and energy, and she saw that, to raise her family for usefulness, her life of ease must cease. MARIS AUGUSTA OLDHAM. She opened a dressmaking and millinery establishment and was enabled to give her children a practical idea of life and a fair education, and to make them more self-reliant than Anglo-Indian children are wont to be. When Marie was fifteen years of age, a great change in the family life was caused by the advent, in Poona, of William Taylor, the American evangelist, now Bishop of Africa. Her oldest sister, Lizzie, became the wife of A. Christie, a government surveyor, who one day announced that a long-bearded, fine-spoken American was holding very extraordinary services in the Free Kirk. The family were all rigid Episcopalians, but curiosity was too strong for their prejudices, and to the Free Kirk they went They had never before heard such pungent and direct presentations of gospel truths. When, at the close of the service, the evangelist requested all who there determined from that time to become followers of Christ, to rise to their feet, Marie was the first to respond, followed by her sister and her brother-in-law. A new trend was given to the whole inner life of the family. Marie became an earnest working member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1875 she became the wife of William F. Oldham, at that time an active layman in the church, who had been led to his religious life by hearing a few words of testimony spoken by Miss Mulligan, in a meeting which he had entered through curiosity. She went to Bangalore, South India, with her husband, who was a government surveyor. While there her sympathies induced her to open a girls' school, which she did, unaided, conducting it alone until help was furnished her. In 1879 her husband, believing himself called to the gospel ministry, prepared to leave India to fit himself in an American college for his life work. Mrs. Oldham heroically consented to four years of separation from her husband, while she in the meantime should support herself in India. In one year she was, largely through the kindness of the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Meadville, Pa., enabled to join her husband in Allegheny College. After spending two years in the college, she entered Boston University as a sophomore. While there her health was menaced, and after a season of rest she entered Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass., Leaving that school in the spring of 1884, she. in the same year, sailed with her husband to India, where they hoped to live and work. She visited her mother and friends a few weeks, holding herself in readiness to go wherever her husband might be sent. Bishop Thoburn, presiding over the India missionary work, appointed him to the South India conference in the fall of 1884, to go to Singapore in far-off Malaysia and plant there a self-supporting mission. The Bishop, seeing the delicate-looking little wife of his newly-appointed missionary standing with her mother and sisters, asked her if she wished the appointment changed. She, though remembering the five years of separation from her home and friends, and looking at the long one in prospect in the distant mission field fourteen days journey by sea and land.answered: "Dr. Thoburn, if my husband has been appointed to open a new foreign mission in Singapore, we will go and open it." Arriving there, she was an inspiration in all branches of the work. She assisted and encouraged her husband in his work among the boys and men. She taught in the boys' school, opened the work among women, and was appointed first president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Malaysia, where with Mrs. Mary Leavitt she organized the work. She, with ladies of her union, was deeply interested in the welfare of English, American and German sailors, visiting the saloons and persuading them to attend gospel and temperance meetings. To reach the women of the different nationalities with a more direct and efficient agency became her aim. Two English women who, like herself, were then in mission work, gave their aid, and by their untiring efforts a permanent mission was established among the women of that beautiful island. America, through the women of Minnesota, furnished the money, and Australia supplied the missionary. Miss Sophia Blackmore. After years of incessant labor, the Oldhams, not only to recruit their health, but in the interest of missions, returned to America, coming by way of China and Japan. Mrs. Oldham, though busy with her husband in a large church in Pittsburgh, Pa., is in much demand on the platform to plead for the work among women in the foreign mission fields. She has written much in behalf of that work and is a contributor to the "Gospel in All Lands" and other missionary periodicals.