Row, Amy P., 1884-1977

Amy P. Row was born in Cornwall, England, on March 7, 1884. She had one brother and one sister; her father founded the Home for Indian Seamen in London. APR was educated at Bella Vista College, and around 1909 left a position at the East London Children's Hospital to travel for five years through Norway, Belgium, South Africa, Australia, Tasmania, Canada, and New Zealand. She spent two years in New Zealand as a missionary with Rev. Fred H. Spencer of the British and Foreign Bible Society, working with the Maori. APR came to the United States as a nanny, working for Edith Wilson Sayre (daughter of Woodrow Wilson), among others. As part of her interest in foreign students, APR founded International House in Cambridge, Mass., in 1924, and headed it for a year.

In 1931, APR returned to England for a visit, and there met Gandhi, who was visiting a mutual friend, Muriel Lester, who ran a settlement house, Kingsley Hall, in east London. According to a clipping from the Boston Transcript, APR also worked at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology that same year; this, however, MIT was not able to confirm.

APR began teaching art at the Framingham Reformatory for Women (FRW), in Framingham, Mass., first as a volunteer for 16 months, and then in 1933 as a paid staff member. She worked until 1940, when her job was eliminated due to a loss of state funding. APR's own paintings were exhibited in the Concord Library in 1973.

The donor of the papers met APR at the Thoreau Nursing Home in Concord, Mass., in the early 1970s. APR was living at the Walden Nursing Home when she died on January 6, 1977.