Mission Educator and Administrator Howell was born in New Jersey in 1874 and earned her Ph.D. degree in sociology from Cornell in 1896. She completed her formal education with a seminary degree from University of Chicago. She taught in Richmond, Kentucky, for four years, coming under the influence of Belle Bennett. In 1903, Bennett persuaded...
First President of the WFMS of the MECS Julianna Gordon was born in 1813 in Northumberland County, Virginia. She married the Reverend Thomas C. Hayes, a member of the Baltimore Conference, in 1843. She became active in the Baltimore women’s missionary groups and was president of one of them, the Trinity Bible Mission, when the...
First Single Woman Missionary of MECS Lochie Rankin was the first unmarried woman to be sent abroad as a missionary by the MECS. She was also the first missionary supported by the Woman’s Foreign Mission Society of the church. She was born in Milan, Tennessee, in 1851. Upon reaching young womanhood, she volunteered herself for...
Leaders of Southern Methodist Women’s Mission Organizations Lucinda Helm was born in 1839, the daughter of John Larue Helm, a railroad president and governor of Kentucky. John Helm established the family seat near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where his daughters lived out their lives. A brother, Ben Hardin Helm, was killed in the Civil War as a...
Missionaries and Mission Supporters David Kelley was born in Tennessee to a prominent Methodist family in 1833. A precocious lad, he was graduated from college at eighteen, entered the Methodist ministry at nineteen, and received a medical degree at twenty. His mother, Margaret Lavinia Kelley, founded the first women’s missionary support group in her minister-husband’s...
Unselfish Servant and Medical Missionary to the Philippines Dr. Hawthorne Darby served as a medial missionary in the Philippines for the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. Born in Colfax, Indiana, she graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1914, and from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia in 1923. She served internships at...
The Amazing Adventures of Methodist Women in Mission This comic showing the history of Methodist women in mission is available at www.unitedmethodistwomen.org/responsecomic. It is also available as a PDF: www.unitedmethodistwomen.org/assemblycomicbook.pdf.
Long-serving missionary to Native Americans in Oklahoma Educator, nurse, civic and church leader, Elizabeth Fulton, at age seventeen, braved the dangers of traveling West to answer the call to become a teacher at the mission school at Tishomingo, Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma. It is claimed that five of her pupils became chiefs of...
Co-founder of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South Willie Elizabeth Harding McGavock was a Tennessee resident whose life centered in her family, her home and the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, of which she was a founder. In 1875, when she heard Dr. and Mrs....
Mission Promoter Extraordinaire Mary Clarke Nind became a member of the Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Winona, Minnesota, in 1866, and in 1879 joined the Minneapolis Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church. Two of the Nind’s five children were in the mission field in the 1880s – Emma Nind Lacy in China, and George Nind in the...
