Abbie B. Dail Adams

 1881 - 1965

Abbie B. Dail Adams, a pioneer in Seventh-day Adventist music, served as piano and reed organ teacher at Alberta Industrial Academy, now Burman University, for seven years, from 1910 to 1917.

Abbie was born on February 17, 1881, in Ozawkie, Kansas, the older of two daughters of William and Catherine Priddy Dail. She attended Healdsburg College in California, forerunner of today's Pacific Union College. Following her marriage to P. P. (Perlie Park) Adams in 1903, she and her husband served as evangelists in Fullerton and Ontario, California, before being invited in 1905 to serve in the British Columbia Conference in Canada, where he served as secretary and treasurer as well as missionary secretary of the conference.

Five years later, they began teaching at AIA, then in its second year at a new location and offering grades eleven and twelve for the first time. They were hired to create a music program, which they did in the next seven years as the school grew from 63 to 223 students. They brought with them a piano, the first at the school, on which she gave lessons in hymn playing for 50c each. She also taught reed organ.

In 1917 they returned to California, where he taught Bible at San Fernando Academy for the next six years before doing pastoral and evangelistic work in central California. Following his retirement in 1942, they continued to work occasionally in evangelism until 1946. They were residing in Yucaipa, California, when he died on March 10, 1956, at age 82. She was living in National City, California, when she died nine years later on March 13, 1965, at age 84.

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Obituary, Review and Herald, April 25, 1965; news notes in other issues of that magazine and the Pacific Union Recorder, dating from 1907 to 1965; 1900 U.S. Federal Census Records; Edith Fitch and Denise Dick Herr, 2007, Changing Lives, The Hilltop Experience, Canadian University College centennial history, pg. 26, faculty listings.