Sara Louisa Oberholtzer

Biography

She was born Sara Louisa Vickers in Uwchlan Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania on May 20, 1841. She was educated at Friends Boarding School, the state normal school in Millersville, and by private tutors. On January 1, 1862, she married John Oberholtzer, of Norristown, Pennsylvania. Their son Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer became a noted historian and biographer.

She was president of the Anti-Tobacco Society (organized by her in 1881), Longport Agassiz Microscopial Society (organized by her in 1884), the Soldiers' Aid Society, the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Pennsylvania Woman's Press Association (1903–05) and superintendent of the School Savings Bank of Pennsylvania.

Beginning in 1890, Oberholtzer devoted much of her time to the introduction of the school savings banks system into the public schools of the United States and Canada. Her bulletin on “School Savings Banks,” written for the United States Bureau of Education, and printed by the government in 1914, was widely distributed. Files of her Thrift Tidings, a quarterly she issued regularly for the public beginning in 1907, could be found in most public libraries. She was the acknowledged leader of the school savings banks movement, which was established in public schools in nearly every state in the United States and some schools in Canada.

She was one of the speakers at the first meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. (1890), at the World's Congress of Women in Chicago in 1893, at the Geneva (Switzerland) meeting in 1903, and elsewhere. She died February 2, 1930.

Literary works

At an early age, she began to contribute poems and articles in prose to newspapers and magazines. Among the books she published are:

Her songs and hymns, set to music by different composers, were found in hymnals, and many of them in sheet form.