Pamelia Sarah Vining

Who was Pamelia Sarah Vining?

Pamelia Sarah Yule née Vining was a Canadian poet. VINING, PAMELIA SARAH, teacher and author; b. 10 April 1826 in Clarendon, N. Y., daughter of Daniel Vining and Lydia —; m. 6 April 1866 James Colton Yule in Woodstock, Upper Canada; they had no children; d. 6 March 1897 in Ingersoll, Ont.

Pamelia Sarah Vining grew up on farms in New York and Michigan. According to a brief, unpublished autobiographical account, while still a child she moved to Oxford County, Upper Canada, where eventually she worked as a district school teacher for a few years. She entered Albion College in 1855, from which she received an msa degree the following year and where she subsequently taught for three years. In 1860 she was invited by the Reverend Robert Alexander Fyfe*, the first principal of the Canadian Literary Institute, a Baptist school in Woodstock, to teach art, literature, and English. She accepted the invitation and taught there until 1866, when marriage to a student of hers necessitated her resignation. The couple began married life in Brantford, where James Yule ran a private grammar school, and then, after 1 Oct. 1868, lived in York Mills, where he was pastor of York Mills Baptist Church. In 1874, after James accepted a professorship in New Testament studies at the Canadian Literary Institute, they returned to Woodstock. Following her husband’s death from tuberculosis on 28 Jan. 1876, Pamelia lived in Brantford and then in Ingersoll. She remained active in the church, particularly concerning foreign missions, and reports and articles by her appeared regularly in the Canadian Missionary Link between 1886 and 1889.