Katharine Elinda Nash Purvis (May 19, 1842 – October 23, 1907) was an educator, political activist, orator, and hymn lyricist in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[1] She is best known as the lyricist for When the Saints Are Marching In and Walk Beside Me, which were reproduced more than five million times during the publication of seventy-five hymnals by the early 1900s.
[4] She began her professional life as a music teacher at the seminary of a Methodist Episcopal Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
[5] In 1896, the hymn When the Saints Are Marching In was published, with music by James Milton Black.
[7] On June 15 of that same year, Purvis delivered an address at the semi-centennial reunion of the Belles Lettres, Gamma Epsilon and the Tripatite literary societies as part of the semi-centennial jubilee celebration of the Williamsport Dickinson Seminary (now Lycoming College) in Williamsport.