John E. HELMS

                   age 19


Mrs. Helms was one of the best known and most successful teachers among the educators of western Virginia. For twenty yearsÑfrom 1874 to 1894Ñshe was the principal of the primary department of the Marion Female College, at Marion, Smyth Co., Va., and in that capacity had the shaping of the minds of her pupils and the molding of their character at the most impressionable period of their lives; the result has been of enduring beneficence to them and a lasting honor to Mrs. Helms. Her great power and success are attributed, by a contemporary writer, to those cardinal qualities which she possessed: "her high conscientious conception of her life work; her purity of thought, of speech and of life; devotion to her friends, and in her consecration to her life-work.Ó