Zella M. Glidden (1907-1994), American Methodist missionary, served in Angola during the first half of the twentieth century. She was a professor at the William Taylor Memorial Institute in the Quessua District of Angola until 1947.
Luther Olin Burtner (1858-1910) was a United Brethren Church missionary. He attended Shenandoah Institute in Virginia, and graduated from Bonebrake Theological Seminary in 1888. In 1885 he was licensed to preach by the Virginia Conference, and in 1888 he was ordained. Burtner then transferred to the Maryland Conference and began his first pastorate at Keedysville, a position he held for four years. From 1892 to 1893 he served at Walkersville.
Later in 1893, he sailed for Sierra Leone, where he was the superintendent in charge of the work of the Foreign Missionary Board of the United Brethren Church. His first furlough was taken in 1896, and while in the United States, he attended the General Conference. Burtner returned to Sierre Leone in 1897, and was one of the few missionaries to escape the massacre of 1898.
Upon his return to the United States, Burtner was appointed to the Hagerstown (Maryland) circuit. In 1898 he was named the presiding elder of the Maryland Conference.
A second missionary tour of duty began in 1901 when he arrived in the Philippines to oversee the work of the Women's Missionary Association. After three years of work, he took a furlough. Between the period of 1904 and 1909 he suffered from failing health and was only able to serve periodically in the home and foreign mission fields.
He married Jennie Light Burtner who served with him on the mission field.
Ernest Isaac Obee (1874-1952), Methodist Protestant Church missionary and minister, was born at Whitehouse, Ohio on October 15, 1874. Obee attended Adrian College and upon graduation in 1904 was quickly accepted as a missionary to Japan with support by the Christian Endeavor Society. Just before his missionary appointment he married Lotta Shields in August. Eventually they gave birth to five children. Together they spent twenty-four years in Japan before returning to the Ohio Annual Conference to pastor various local churches.
While in Japan Obee's duties included President of the Nagoya Boys Middle School, Mission Treasurer and District Missionary. Under his administration the Boy's School would eventually enroll over one-thousand students. Upon returning to the United States in 1928 he would become the pastor of the following Methodist Protestant congregations: Lewistown, Arlington, Rush Creek and Mount Cory. By 1940, the annual conference granted him superannuated status (retirement) but Obee continued to be a short-term supple pastor to various local churches when needed. Many of these churches were considered to be home mission charges.
Unfortunately, Ernest and Lotta were not able to enjoy their retirement together because of her untimely death in 1940. Two years later Obee married Paula Smelser who would outlive him. Obee died in Lima, Ohio, on March 20, 1952. His funeral took place at the Allentown Church on April 2 and subsequent burial was at the Whitehouse cemetery.
Dora Amelia Wagner (1888-1980), American Missionary, daughter of John Franklin and Helen Mardora Wagner, was born on October 10, 1888, in LaCygne County, Kansas. Wagner, who became a deaconess in the Methodist Episcopal Church, attended both Baker and Northwestern Universities for her formal education. Upon completing her higher education, the Women's Foreign Missionary Society sent Wagner to Japan and arrived in Tokyo on December 7, 1913. Wagner taught at Aoyama Jogakuin Girl's School (1913-1915), Women's Christian College (1923-1933) in Tokyo as well as Iai Jogakko Girls School in Hakodate (1915-1922, 1933-1941 and 1946-1953). Besides teaching other duties included supervising Sunday School work in the Hakodate area, YMCA, church choir and organist. During World War II, she worked with Japanese churches in Colorado. Because of her commitment to Japanese education, the government awarded her the Fifth Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1953. Wagner left Japan for good on June 30, 1953 and retired to the Robincroft Home in Pasadena, California. She died on September 22, 1980, in Lemon Grove, California
Anna Smith (1876-1963) was an Evangelical United Brethren Church missionary to Sierra Leone. She attended school in Houghton, New York. Smith taught in public schools and then married William Boardman (?-1902). They went to Africa in 1902 and were Stationed at the Kunzu mission in Sierra Leone. Soon after their arrival in Africa Boardman died, but Smith carried on her work until she was furloughed in 1904. From 1904 to 1906 she was a field worker in the United States.
After returning to Africa in 1906 she married Reverend J. Hal Smith (1862-1915), and they became the first missionaries into Kono Land in the interior of Sierra Leone. Anna smith worked diligently at language study of the Kono dialect, and she successfully translated the four Gospels, as well as creating a dictionary and basic grammar book. Due to ill health she was forced to return to the United States in 1908. She remained on furlough until 1909. Smith returned to Sierra Leone later in 1909. A second furlough was taken from 1911 to 1912. From 1912 to 1914 she was again in Africa, but was forced to return to the United States due to failing health.
Unable to return to Africa, Smith began work with the Board of Foreign Missions as a fund raiser. She was elected Special Secretary in 1916 of the United Brethren Mission Board. In 1942 she retired. Soon after Smith became pastor of the Wayne Valley Evangelical United Brethren Church near Cory Pennsylvania (Erie Conference).
The Mende are one of the major ethnic groups in Sierra Leone occupying mainly the eastern and southern regions. Together with the Kono, Susu, and Yalunka ethnic groups, the Mende comprised one half of the population. The Mende language is a language of the Mende branch of the Niger-Congo family.
Virginia "Jennie" M. Atkinson (1861-1941) was a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, missionary in China from 1884-1940. After graduating from Lagrange Female College in Georgia, she went to China in October 1884 with Laura Haygood. Working primarily in the Shanghai and Soochow regions, Atkinson taught, was instrumental in establishing several schools, and involved in women's work.
In Soochow, she was placed in charge of the city day schools under the Woman' s Board and later established a center in the western part of the city which accommodated four of the schools. She founded the Atkinson Academy for Boys in 1896 and the Davidson Girls' School. When the Boxer Rebellion erupted, she took many Chinese Christians to Japan where they were refugees for four months. In 1901 Atkinson returned to Soochow and continued her work with the day schools. During this period of her work another center, the Embroidery Mission, was opened, providing evangelistic work, teaching, and housing for many Chinese women.
Atkinson also purchased land, with the approval of the Women's Board, to provide buildings for the Davidson Girls' School, the Louise Home for Missionaries, the Moka Garden Embroidery Mission, and the Kindergarten and Kindergarten Training School. She then moved to Changshu to work with Chinese teachers and Bible women (evangelist/teachers for women). With the assistance of her Alabama Conference, Atkinson again purchased land near the Center at Moka Garden, on which the Dowdell Church was built for the Embroidery Mission and the women's work of the church.
Upon her retirement in 1927 with emeritus status she received special permission to stay in China near Soochow, remaining through the Japanese invasion, ministering to the Chinese. Due to poor health and the growing threat of war, Atkinson eventually left China in 1940. She was later buried in China.
Gertrude M. Feely (1903-1996) was a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, missionary in Japan. Feely received her B.S. from the University of Missouri in 1927. She earned an M.A. from Scarritt College in Tennessee in 1930 and a Ph.d. in education from Columbia University in 1950.
Feely was a missionary for more than forty years, and worked in several Japanese cities. From 1931 to 1933, she taught English and language study at the Kure Naval Station and at Kobe. While in Oita from 1933 to 1941, Feely was involved with youth work and taught English.
In 1941, she went to the Philippines and during the Second World War was interned by the Japanese. She spent time on the Santo Tomas and Los Banos Camps and stayed with a group of Methodist missionaries at Harris Memorial Training School for some time before she was finally interned in Los Banos. She served as an interpreter for two and a half years of the war.
Upon her liberation on February 23, 1945, Feely was furloughed to the United States, where she remained until 1949. Feely returned to Japan later in 1949 and became the director of the Kobe Christian Youth Center, which opened in 1953. She continued to teach, working at the Night School, at the Palmore Institute and at Seiwa Junior College, where she was an instructor in the Old Testament. In 1954, Feely was ordained by the Church of Japan. She retired in 1972.
Walter Russell Lambuth (1854-1921), an American bishop, medical doctor and missionary, was born in Shanghai on November 10, 1854, the son of missionary parents, James William and Mary Isabella (McClellan) Lambuth. In 1859, he was sent to his relatives in Tennessee and Mississippi for his early education. His parents returned during the Civil War, and the Lambuth went back to China with them in 1864 and remained five years. He graduated from Emory and Henry College in 1875, studied theology and medicine at Vanderbilt University and received a medical degree.
In 1877 he was ordained an elder in the Tennessee Conference and was sent to China, where he worked in Shanghai and adjacent areas. During that same year he married Daisy Kelly. Mrs. Lambuth was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on February 24, 1858. Lambuth returned on furlough in 1881 and studied at Bellvue Hospital Medical College in New York and received a second degree of doctor of medicine. He returned to China in 1882 and organized medical and hospital service at Soochow and Beijing. In 1885, with his father, the founded the Japan Mission of his church and established the notable Kwansei Gakuin and the Hiroshima Girls' School. In 1891 he was assigned to field service in the United States and became editor of the Methodist Review of Missions. In 1894 he was elected general secretary of the Board of Missions, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. In this capacity he helped to unite Methodism in Canada and to form the autonomous Japanese Methodist Church, a union of all Methodist bodies working in that field.
Lambuth was elected bishop by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1910 and was assigned to Brazil. In the same year the Board of Missions projected a mission in Africa and in 1911 Lambuth, accompanied by John W. Gilbert of Paine College and a leader in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, went to that continent. They traveled 2,600 miles by boat and rail and 1,500 miles on foot through the jungles to the village of Wembo Nyama in the Belgian Congo. Their cordial reception by Chief Wembo Nyama convinced Lambuth that he had been providentially led to the Batetela tribe, and he proceeded to arrange for a mission. After more than a year, he returned home and recruited a group of missionaries, whom he took to the Congo in 1913. For his travels through Africa he was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London. During World War I, Lambuth went to Europe, visited the front, and made arrangements for establishing Southern Methodism in Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In 1921 he took a party of missionaries to Siberia and founded a mission there, but it met opposition and was of short duration. He served briefly on the Pacific cast and for a period resided at Oakdale, California. Bishop Lambuth participated in the Ecumenical Methodist Conferences, the World Missionary Conference and other movements involving the cooperation of the churches. He wrote three books on medical missions, the Orient and the missionary movement. Lambuth died at Yokohama, Japan, on September 26, 1921, and his ashes were buried by the side of his mother in Shanghai. Daisy Kelly Lambuth died on May 24, 1923 in Oakdale, California.
Herbert Cookman Withey (1873-1937) was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 8, 1873. At twelve, he went with his parents, Amos E. and Irene Withey, to the interior of Angola, with the original Bishop William Taylor party in 1885. From his early youth he, like his parents, was devoted to mission work. Withey combined evangelistic, educational, and industrial service in his Christian ministry to the Angolans. He learned the local languages and translated Pilgrims Progress, the catechism, the Discipline, the Psalms, and the New Testament into those languages. At the time of his death on February 9, 1937, he was working on a translation of the New Testament.
Gladys Doyle (1899-1991) was a Methodist Episcopal Church missionary to India for forty years. She received a B.A. from the University of North Colorado in 1924 and an M.A. from Drew Theological Seminary in 1925. Later that year she sailed for India to begin her work as an education missionary. During her first term she supervised Methodist schools in northern India. Doyle also taught school in the Himalaya mountains. From 1950 to 1967 she supervised village schools in three districts. In addition to these duties, beginning in 1958, Doyle was in charge of evangelistic work among women in the four districts of the Moradabad Conference. Active in the campaigns of the Laubach Literacy Movement, Doyle wrote two readers in Hindi with Dora Walters. After her retirement in 1967 Doyle returned to Boulder, Colorado, where she was active in the First United Methodist Church and United Methodist Women.