THE AUK: 



A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF 

 ORNITHOLOGY. 



Vol. xxxvi. April, 1919. No. 2. 



MRS. OLIVE THORNE MILLER. 



BY FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY. 

 Plate VII. 



Little more than a month after the last meeting of the A. O. U., 

 at which greetings were sent from the Council to Mrs. Miller as the 

 oldest living member of the Union, came the announcement of her 

 death, on December 26, 1918. Born on June 25, 1831, she had 

 indeed been allotted a full span, and for thirty-one of her eighty- 

 seven years she had been associated with the American Ornitholo- 

 gists' Union joining four years after it was founded and being made 

 Member in 1901 when that class was established. 



Harriet Mann — for the more familiar name of Olive Thorne 

 Miller was the pen name adopted after her marriage — was born 

 at Auburn, New York, where her father, Seth Hunt, was a banker; 

 but she was of New England ancestry on both sides of the family, 

 her paternal grandfather being an importing merchant of Boston, 

 and her great-grandfather, Captain Benjamin Mann, having 

 organized a company during the revolution of which he was in 

 command at Bunker Hill. 



From Auburn the family moved to Ohio when she was eleven 

 years old, making the journey, in lieu of railroads, by "packet" 

 on the canal through the Mohawk Valley, by steamer across Lake 

 Erie, and finally by an old-fashioned thoroughbrace coach for 

 twenty-five miles through Ohio — a journey full of romance to an 



163 



