News

Kang, Cheng (Ida Kahn, K’ang Ch’eng) (1873-1930)

One Of The First Chinese Medical Doctors

Kang Cheng, also known as Ida Kahn, was born into a poor family in Jiujiang (Kiukiang), Jiangxi province. She was adopted by Gertrude Howe, a student of the University of Michigan, and left school to work as a missionary in Jiujiang before completing her degree. During Kang’s childhood, she studied at Rulison-Fish Memorial School, established by Howe. At the age of nine, Kang traveled and lived with Howe in San Francisco, Japan, and Chongqin (Chungking), China, and did not return to Jiujiang until 1886.

In 1892, upon graduation from the Jiujiang girls’ school, Kang and her close friend Shih Mei-yu (Mary Stone) were sent by Howe to study medicine in Howe’s alma mater, the University of Michigan. The two were the first Asian women to graduate from Michigan in medicine, receiving their degrees in 1896. Upon graduation, Kang and Shi returned to work in Jiujiang as medical missionaries of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and treated over 2,000 patients in the first 10 months in their one-room hospital.

They started to propose a new hospital project in 1898 sponsored by Isaac Newton Danforth, a well-known medical doctor in Chicago, but the project had to discontinue due to Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Kang had to flee for refuge in Japan. In 1901, she returned to Jiujiang again helping Shi Meiyu to establish the Elizabeth Skelton Danforth Hospital. Two years later, invited by officials in Nanchang, Kang left Jiujiang and set up a new hospital in Nanchang, supported by the contributions of local people. In 1908, she went to study literature at Northwestern University in the United States, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1911. She was given an honorary master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1920.

Kang was frequently involved in social welfare and relief work. Her hospital at Nanchang treated thousands of refugees and wounded soldiers during the revolution of 1911 and the Northern Expedition of 1926. She served as a member of the Tianjin Christian Union Flood Relief Committee to help the needy when a flood struck Tianjin (Tientsin). In addition to taking care of patients, she was concerned about medical education, evangelistic work, and women’s issues. She attended a number of ecumenical and church conferences as a delegate from China. She spoke at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910 and attended the world conference of the YWCA in Berlin the same year. She also served as a committee member of the National Christian Council of China, formed in 1922. She was the author of An Amazon in Cathay (1912) and numerous articles.

Kang was finally burned out by long-term heavy work. Her health was getting worse since 1926. In 1930, she died in Shanghai at the age of 58.

By Kwok Pui-lan

This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright 1998 Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of The Gale Group; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved. It is taken, with permission, from the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity: https://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/ida-kahn

Sources

Kang’s articles include “The Doctor’s Opportunity in Visiting Homes,” Woman’s Work in the Far East 35, no. 4 (December 1914): 170-174 and “The Place of Chinese Christian Women in the Development of China,” Chinese Recorder 50 (1919): 659-662.

Her biography is found in Margaret Burton, Notable Women of China (1912).

Her personal papers are in the archives of the United Methodist Church in Madison, New Jersey.

Kwok Pui-lan, Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992.

Photo: Dr. Ida Kahn, Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church , “Mission Photograph Album – Portraits #3 page 0064,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed November 8, 2017, http://catalog.gcah.org/omeka/items/show/59683.

Huang Naishang (1844-1924)

Chinese Christian Publisher And Political Reformer

Huang was born in 1844 to a poor family in a small town of Minqing County west of Fuzhou in the province of Fujian. His father, Huang Qingbo, was a carpenter who also tilled the land. Huang came into contact with missionaries from the American Methodist Episcopal church in 1861 and was baptized as a Christian convert on 16 December 1866. He then proceeded to travel with Reverend Xu Yangmei on his preaching circuit for the next two years, at which point he was granted a probationary preacher’s license, and continued in ministry until 1872.

From that year, Huang began to help the missionaries with translation and literary work, since he had received a basic education in the Confucian classics and wrote well. Apart from helping to translate the Bible, from 1874 Huang became the key helper with a Chinese newspaper the missionaries started that year called Zion’s Messenger (Huanshan shizhe yuebao). Huang used the newspaper as a platform to write articles advocating a number of modern reforms. His was one of the first Chinese voices to call for using vaccinations against smallpox, as well as for putting an end to the practice of foot-binding. In addition, he was a strong advocate of mission education who favored instruction in English so that Chinese Christians could tap into Western knowledge and the field of commerce. Education of women was part of his vision and he established two private schools, one 1873 and the other in 1885, to educate his own children, including his daughters.

Starting from the early 1870s, Huang decided to prepare for China’s traditional civil service examinations. He chose this course because he saw the numerous conflicts that Chinese Christians experienced with local society and how they were discriminated against and marginalized by local gentry. Huang believed that if there were Christians who were members of the gentry it would improve the situation. He studied hard and in 1877 obtained the basic shengyuan degree, which was followed in 1894 by the much more difficult juren degree. This was quite an achievement, given the stiff competition for degrees in the latter part of the Qing dynasty. When Huang traveled to Beijing in 1895 to take exams for the highest level jinshi degree (which he never obtained), the Sino-Japanese War was underway, and he suffered the pain both of China’s defeat and the loss of his younger brother, who was a sailor in the navy. Huang then joined other scholars in Beijing in support of Kang Youwei and his call for China to reject a peace treaty with Japan and to immediately seek ways to strengthen the nation.

Upon returning to Fujian, and in light of the dangers facing his country, Huang decided to leave his work at the Methodist Episcopal mission and instead seek to promote a Christianized China through political and educational reform. To this end, in 1896 he used his own funds to launch a secular Chinese newspaper called Fubao, which was the first newspaper started by a Chinese in Fujian. It was a two-page paper published twice a week and it advocated adoption of such reforms as a parliamentary system and a free press. However, after a year he had to shut the paper down because it was losing money.

Three years later, Huang was in Beijing again to take the jinshi exams when the 100 Hundred Day Reform movement led by Kang Youwei started. He not only actively supported this, but through a friend from Fujian who was very close to Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, he became directly connected with the leaders of the movement. He himself submitted eight petitions to the Guangxu Emperor, one of which recommended adopting pinyin to help with the study of Chinese characters. However, when the reform movement met with a conservative backlash and some of its leaders were arrested and executed by the government, Huang was forced to flee quickly to Fujian, since he was number eleven on the most wanted list.

Shortly thereafter, Huang decided to start a new settlement of Chinese in Malaysia in order to escape China’s despotism and Fujian’s poverty. While in Singapore considering where he might establish such a colony, Huang met Sun Yatsen and the two soon became good friends. Huang’s translation into Chinese of a book on American history won Sun’s respect, and Huang admired Sun’s democratic ideals and commitment to Christianity. In 1901, Huang traveled with settlers from Fujian to Sibu, where he founded New Fuzhou. Before long New Fuzhou had a population of over one thousand Chinese, two-thirds of them Christians. Huang spent the next three years attending to myriad administrative tasks needed to get the community established. Unexpectedly, in 1904 he returned to Fujian, in part because his administration of the settlement did not generate enough profit to satisfy the local ruler who had supplied the land.

Back in Fujian, Huang founded the Fujian Daily News and was a leader of Fujian activities during the nation-wide anti-American boycott of 1905, which protested the adoption of exclusion laws by the United States preventing Chinese laborers from entering the country. While he avoided harsh anti-foreignism, Huang did not hesitate to strongly and publicly condemn the American policy.

By this time, Huang had also shifted his political views from favoring reform, as he had in 1898, to supporting revolution. Young J. Allen, the missionary editor of the influential Chinese language Globe Magazine in Shanghai, was a key person in convincing Huang that support for revolution was a legitimate Christian position. Huang then began to distribute tracts calling for revolution and became an active supporter of Sun Yat-sen, sending information on revolutionary activities in Fujian to Sun’s agents in Singapore, who then reported it to Sun in Tokyo. Huang joined Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance in 1906 and was a key figure in planning the Huang Gang uprising and recruiting many of those who participated in it.

From 1907 to 1911, Huang focused primarily on promoting educational reform by founding 34 Chinese secondary schools in the Min County region of Fujian, which he made sure taught Western subjects and inculcated nationalism. Also, in 1909 he was elected to the Fujian Provincial Assembly, which was part of the constitutional reform program that the Qing government had been forced to adopt. Huang became one of the leading members of the legislative body and he proposed numerous reforms, for instance to ensure better use of Fujian’s natural resources, to counter opium and gambling, and to introduce penal reform.

In 1911, after the 1910 Wuhan Uprising began to unravel Qing rule in China, Huang began to spread revolutionary ideology among students at the Methodist Anglo-Chinese Academy in Fuzhou, where he was Dean. In addition, he established the Fuzhou Qiaonan Physical Training Society as a front for the Fujian Revolutionary Alliance where it could train the students who joined the movement. On the 9th and 10th of November 1911, Huang and the Fujian Alliance fought against and defeated the Imperial Army in Fuzhou with the help of these students, and thus brought Qing rule in the province to an end. As a supporter of Sun, Huang was appointed head of the Board of Communications for the provisional Fujian government in November 1911, but his high-level public service soon came to an end when Yuan Shikai deposed all Sun’s supporters in September 1912.

Huang spent his remaining years engaged in various community projects, serving as head of the Board of Trustees for the Fuzhou YMCA, helping to edit a political newspaper, and being sought out as an adviser to government officials. He held his Christian faith to the end. As he lay on his deathbed, he asked his wife to hold up a picture of Christ for him to see, and asked that the picture be laid on his chest as he died on 22 September 1924.

Huang Naishang was one of the most influential and impressive Chinese Protestants of the Imperial era. His experience in ministry and his two decades assisting missionaries in literary work instilled in him a strong faith and an informed Christian worldview, as well as a familiarity with modern knowledge. His Confucian upbringing and success in the civil service examinations were extremely rare for Chinese Christians at the time and allowed him to have significant social influence. Huang used this influence to seek the reform and Christianization of Chinese society through educational and political change. He described his motivation to do these things as Christian altruism, which combined Christian notions of personal sacrifice for the benefit of others with Confucian ideals of public service. Huang’s many years of ministry and community involvement touched numerous lives and did much to enhance the credibility of the church and of Christianity in China.

By John Barwick, Ph.D., Research Associate with Global China Center and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

This article is taken, with permission, from the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity: https://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/huang-naishang

Sources

Anne Pang (Huang Biyao), “Huang Naishang: Revolutionary with a Vision for a Christian China,” in Carol Lee Hamrin with Stacey Bieler, eds. Salt and Light 3: More Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 17–37.

Howe, Gertrude (1847-1928)

Missionary Advocate For Chinese Women

Howe attended the University of Michigan and in 1872 went to Kiukiang, China, as the pioneer missionary of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church. For a few years she was joined by her sister, Dr. Delia Howe. In 1873, she founded what became the Rulison Girls’ High School, which insisted on unbound feet for admittance. To the shock of fellow missionaries, she adopted four Chinese girls and began to teach them English. After a dispute between the WFMS and the Methodist mission board over her mission policies, in 1883 she transferred to Chungking to open a girls’ school that was destroyed by riots two years later. Returning to Kiukiang, she continued her educational work, preached throughout the countryside, and trained “Bible women.”

With confidence in Chinese ability she tutored Chinese students in higher branches of Western learning. In 1892, she took five Chinese pupils to the University of Michigan and supported them. Two were among the first Chinese women to become medical doctors, Mary Stone and Ida Kahn. Kahn, who was one of Howe’s adopted daughters, founded a hospital in Nanchang. Howe’s other daughters married prominent Chinese educators and government ministers, and one became an itinerant evangelist. Howe mothered and educated many other Chinese children, refusing to leave them for vacations in “Westerners only” resorts, and living as a Chinese so as to have money for the children. She did a lot of translation work, including the Methodist Hymn Book, and compiled The History of the Reformation in Chinese. In 1926, she moved to Nanchang to live with Ida Kahn and to superintend the work of Bible women. After surviving the 1927 civil war, she died as one of Methodism’s most well-known missionaries.

By Dana L. Robert, Professor of International Mission, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Sources

The most valuable source on Howe’s life are the clippings in her file at the archives of the United Methodist Church in Madison. N. J., and the correspondence about her in the files of other missionaries. See pamphlets “Gertrude Howe” by Frances J. Baker, and “Miss Gertrude Howe” by Mary Stone. She wrote articles for Heathen Woman’s Friend and other religious publications.

Howard, Leonora (Leonora Howard King) (1851-1925)

Medical Missionary To China

A native of Ontario, Canada, Howard graduated in 1876 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, her medical education having been paid for by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1877, she went to Peking (Beijing) under WFMS auspices and took charge of the Peking hospital. In March 1879, she was called to Tientsin (Tianjin) to care for Lady Li hung Chang, wife of the viceroy. Lady Li, having recovered, wanted Howard to remain in Tientsin. The viceroy had turned a temple into a medical dispensary under the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS), and as an inducement to stay, the viceroy proposed that Howard open a women’s ward.

In 1881, the Methodists opened the Isabella Fisher Hospital (named after the mother of the principal donor, in Baltimore, Maryland) in Tientsin. Howard managed the hospital until her 1884 marriage to Alexander M. King of the LMS, which ended her connection with WFMS. The Kings remained in China; she maintained her contacts with the vice-regal families and then with the Nationalist government until her death, although she never became an official LMS missionary.

By Susan E. Warrick, Independent Scholar in United Methodist Missions History, Madison, New Jersey, USA

Sources:

Margaret Negodaeff-Tomsik, The Good Fight is a full-length biography (1994).

Information about Howard can also be found in Frances J. Baker, The Story of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (1896) and in Mary Isham, Valorous Ventures (1936).

Baldwin, Stephen Livingston (1835-1902)

Missionary Newspaper Publisher In China

Born in Somerville, New Jersey. Baldwin arrived in Fukien, Foochow, in 1858 and returned to America three years later because of the poor health of his wife, who died on the voyage home. In 1862 Baldwin returned to Foochow and was one of the first missionaries who proposed that Chinese churches should be self-supporting. In 1868, he was put in charge of his denomination’s newsletter, The Missionary Recorder. He transformed it into an interdenominational newsletter and changed its name to The Chinese Recorder (Jiao Wu Za Zhi). This periodical became the most important document in understanding foreign missions in China. In 1871, on his third trip to China, he was appointed to be in charge of Foochow mission. After attending the conference organized by the MEC, he pastored churches in New York and New England, of the archives of the MEC. In the following year, he was elected honorary secretary at the World Missionary Conference held in New York. He died in Brooklyn, New York.

By China Group, A Collaboration of China Scholars

This article is reproduced, with permission, from A Dictionary of Asian Christianity, copyright 2001 by Scott W. Sunquist, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved. It is taken, with permission, from the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity: https://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/baldwin-stephen-livingston

Sources:

Carlson, Ellsworth C., The Foochow Missionaries 1847-1880 (1974).

Bashford, James Whitford (1848-1919)

First Resident MEC Bishop In China

Born in Fayette, Wisconsin, Bashford studied at the University of Wisconsin and Boston University School of Theology. After serving first as a pastor, then for 15 years as president of Ohio Wesleyan University, he was elected a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles and in 1904 was assigned at his own request to China at age 55, the first resident bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in China. (Three branches of American Methodism operated in separate regions of China until they merged in 1939 to form the Methodist Church. The Chinese Methodist churches did not elect their own bishops until 1930.)

An able administrator and a man of vision, Bashford bought great progress to his church and its institutions in his 15 years as episcopal leader in China. Always a loyal Methodist, he led the way toward union and cooperation among Protestant forces in China, especially in educational and medical work, Bible translation, and production of a common hymnal; he was instrumental in introducing a spirit of interchurch cooperation among his fellow Methodists. In 1904, he served as first president of the board of Hwa Nan Women’s College, Foochow (Fuzhou), and encouraged the union of colleges for men and for women in four major cities as early as 1905. He helped bring about union theological seminaries in Foochow and Nanking (Nanjing).

Bashford favored the union of the northern and southern branches of Methodism in China as early as 1906, as well as Methodist participation in forming the National Christian Council in 1922. However, he opposed a Chinese Methodist Church independent from the American church, believing that a “world church” like Methodism should maintain its integrity “organically as well as in spirit.”

By Donald E. MacInnis, Formerly Director of the China Program, National Council of Churches in the USA, Coordinator for China Research of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Maryknoll, New York, USA

Sources:

Bashford wrote China and Methodism (1906) and (his major work) China: An Interpretation (1916; rev, and enlarged, 1919).

G. R. Grose, James W. Bashford: Pastor, Educator, Bishop (1922);

Jerry Israel, “The Missionary Catalyst: Bishop James W. Bashford and the Social Gospel in China,” Methodist History 14 (1975);

Walter Lacy, A Hundred Years of Methodism (1948).

Bashford’s journals are in the Missionary Research Library, New York.

Collins, Judson Dwight (1823-1852)

Pioneering Methodist Episcopal Missionary To China

Collins was one of eight children in a pious Methodist farm family in Michigan. While still a college student, he determined to become a missionary to China, but there was no Methodist mission work there, so after graduation he taught for two years at Albion College. In 1847, he was called to New York, where he was ordained an elder and commissioned with Dr. and Mrs. Moses C. White, the first Methodist missionaries to China. They sailed on April 15 and arrived in Foochow (Fuzhou), one of the five treaty ports, four months later. To create an opening for the gospel, Collins opened a school for boys in 1847 and another in 1848. He worked with other missionaries on Bible translation and distribution of tracts. In 1850, he was appointed superintendent of the Foochow Mission. Plagued with illness, he returned to the United States in 1851 and died the following year.

By Donald E. MacInnis, Formerly Director of the China Program, National Council of Churches in the USA, Coordinator for China Research of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Maryknoll, New York, USA

Sources:

F. C. Bald, “First Missionary to China,” Quarterly Review (Univ. of Michigan, n.d.);

Frank T. Cartwright, “Notes on Early Foochow History,” unpublished manuscript in archives of the United Methodist Church, Madison, N. J.;

Walter Lacy, A Hundred Years of China Methodism (1948).

Feely, Gertrude

Mission Educator In Japan

Gertrude M. Feely was a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, missionary in Japan. She served under the guidance of the Women’s Division of the MECS and after 1940 of the Methodist Church.

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 in 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.

The collection has a variety of information about her experience as a missionary and as a person during the Second World War. There is a touching meditation that she wrote on her 36th ( 1939) birthday describing the challenges, both personal and emotional, involved in becoming a missionary. There are also camp newsletters produced by the internees. The last newsletter leads off with the following: “After 37 long months we celebrate our first day of freedom to-day with the final departure of the Japanese from the City of Manila, and await with bounding hearts our own, our friends, our allies.” Feely also kept a diary during her interment. The diary was in the form of letters to a friend in Manila. She also kept a notebook which tracked conditions in the camp.

In these documents we see the humanity of the individual. She returned to Japan after the war and helped the people there re-build their lives and their church. She retired in 1972.

Follow the link to see a description and listing of the materials available from GCAH for research on Rev. Feely: Gertrude Feely Papers

This story taken with permission from the General Commission on Archives and History: https://catalog.gcah.org/gertrude-feely-papers

Strawbridge, Robert (?? – 1781)

Pioneer Methodist Lay Preacher In The United States

Robert Strawbridge ( ? -1781) emigrated from Ireland to Frederick County, Maryland sometime between 1760 and 1766. A Methodist preacher in Ireland, he began preaching in Maryland soon after his arrival, making him the pioneer of Methodism on the American continent.

He preached in his log cabin home and began organizing Methodist societies as early as 1763 or 1764. The first class met in his home and soon a second met at a nearby home. John Evans (1734-1827), one of Strawbridge’s converts, led the first class from 1768-1804. These were perhaps the earliest Methodist organizations in American history. During these early years, Strawbridge also built log meeting houses at Sam’s Creek and Bush near Aberdeen.

Strawbridge soon began itinerating in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, often preaching the first Methodist sermons heard in a settlement. He established a number of societies, prompted the construction of several Methodist chapels, possibly including the Old Stone Church in Leesburg, Virginia. He was tremendously popular and had a major influence on many young preachers.

Strawbridge, who probably was never ordained, nevertheless regularly administered the sacraments. At the first conference of Methodist preachers in America (1773), this practice was condemned, although an exception was made for Strawbridge, who was allowed to continue it under Asbury’s direction. Francis Asbury in particular was unhappy about the matter, especially when Strawbridge ignored the conference’s action and continued to administer the Lord’s Supper as before!

Asbury recorded his frustration in his journal entry for June 24, 1774: “[O]ne of these letters informed me that Mr. Strawbridge was very officious in adminstering the ordinances. What strange infatuation attends that man! Why will he run before Providence?”

Taken with permission from Heritage Landmarks: A Traveler’s Guide to the Most Sacred Places in The United Methodist Church, by the General Commission on Archives and History. For more information, see http://www.gcah.org/research/travelers-guide/robert-strawbridge-house

Collins, Everell Stanton (E.S.) (1866-1940)

Generous Mission Benefactor

Everell Stanton (E.S.) Collins was an American lumberman and Methodist laymen who at this death in 1940 left the income from vast forest tracks in Pennsylvania and California to the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions; today, the Collins Forest income provides health and retirement benefits for qualified missionaries who serve through the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, a successor to the Board of Foreign Missions.

Collins was born in Cortland, New York in March of 1866, but soon was at work with his father in the woods of Pennsylvania. The Collins family history on the internet reports:

As a boy and a young man, E.S. worked in his father’s mills and forests in the Tionesta Valley of Pennsylvania. At thirteen, he’d already spent winters in sub-zero temperatures hauling timbers out of frozen creeks. At fifteen, he was working in the mill jacking logs and edging. By eighteen, he was running the mill. In between, he’d taught himself the skills of an engineer and patented a pocketful of sawmill inventions.

His formal education included the school in Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, then onto Carrier Seminary in Clarion, Pennsylvania, and finally, one year at Allegheny College. That one year came to an abrupt end when he had to withdraw because of chronic coughs and colds referred to then as consumption. When he wasn’t working in the mill, the forest, or going to school, he was avidly attending services in the Methodist Church and taking in revival meetings that came through the area. There was, of course, always time to be a boy – hunting squirrels, ducks, grouse, woodchucks, and rattlesnakes; fishing for trout; cutting beehives from trees; hiking, swimming, and berry picking.

Simply said, E.S.’s young years boiled down to school, church, fun, and work, then more work, and more work. Then there was God: he trusted in God. (https://www.collinsco.com/history/)

Heeding the advice of Horace Greeley to “go west young man,” Collins explored timber options in several areas and came to focus on the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. His Methodism went with him. He developed a major, family-owned company, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, that would come to stress good stewardship in the use of land and forest. He also built a fortune, using much of it for philanthropic purposes. He is remembered, as an editorial in the Oregon Journal said on January 1, 1941, as “shy, serious, disciplined, intelligent…He acquired a life of meaning and purpose.” E.S. Collins and his wife, Mary Laffey, had three children.

The Journal editorial enumerated many of the institutions and causes Collins endowed, concluding: “But perhaps his most generous gift was giving, in perpetuity, 60 per cent of the net profits from the Collins Pennsylvania Forest and the Collins Almanor Forest (in California) to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Church.”

The income streams from the original land and trusts were consolidated over the years to provide support for missionary health and retirement benefits programs. The annual revenue depends on the harvest.

Narrative by Elliott Wright, drawing form Collins, Global Ministries, and public media sources.