Mary Harriet Porter, 1901

Containers:
Box 1, Folder 2
Scope and content:

Letter written by Mary Harriet Porter while a missionary in Peking, China, about her life and work, as well as a letter written by the mission board about her.

Biographical / historical:

Mary Harriet Porter was a Congregationalist missionary to China from 1868-1886 and again from 1894-1911. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin on November 22, 1846, she was the daughter of Rev. Jeremiah Porter, who founded the first Presbyterian church in Chicago in 1833, and Eliza Chappell Porter, who helped establish and taught in Chicago's first public school. In 1868 Porter began her first tour in Peking as a member of the North China Mission under the ABCFM, and was the first missionary sponsored by the Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior, headquatered in Chicago. She was in charge of the Bridgman School for Girls until 1882, then moved with her brother, Henry Dwight Porter, and his wife Elizabeth to Pang Chung, China. Between 1886 and 1893, Porter returned to the US and cared for her parents in Beloit, Wisonconsin. After her father died, she returned to Pang Chung and taught in a girls boarding school, but fled to Peking during the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and again taught in the Bridgman School for Girls. From 1906 until her retirement to California in 1911, she served as the principal of the Angel Memorial Bible Training School, which she founded. Porter also compiled and published Methodist church leader Nellie Naomi Russell's China research as "Gleanings from Chinese Folklore" in 1915, and wrote a book about her sister in law titled "Elizabeth Chappell Porter: A Memoir" in 1892. Porter died on January 10, 1929.

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