Iowa
History Project
____________________________________
~~~*~~~
______________________
Closely allied with their efforts in behalf of the freedmen and
the American Indians are the activities of the Iowa Friends along other
philanthropic lines, particularly their missionary work in the island of
Jamaica. After the first appearance of missionary zeal among the early Friends
in England it will be remembered that a strange apathy seemed to pervade the
new religious order. This decline in zeal continued until the Quakers, in the
new world at least, “actually came to find a satisfaction in the thought that
they were not a proselyting people”(338) and so withdrew from
all evangelistic or missionary effort. But there came a reawakening. The
progressive or orthodox branch of the Society throughout America heard the call
to world-wide evangelization, and arose to meet the call under the direction of
the American Friends’ Board of Foreign Missions, in the work of which the Iowa
Yearly Meeting of Orthodox Friends has borne a prominent part both with men and
means.
Before the Separation of 1877 took
place in the Iowa Yearly Meeting, a so-called “Missionary Association” had been
organized among the membership, with a president at its head and vice
presidents in each of the several Quarterly Meetings. The work of the
association seems, for a time, to have been purely local, consisting of “tract
reading, temperance and Sabbath school work, visiting the families of the poor”(339) and such like; but it was not long until its
activities were extended to the founding of “mission school”, the “assisting to
reform and find homes for the outcast and destitute”, and the holding of open
air meetings in county jails—a work similar to that carried on at present by
the Salvation Army.(340) This organization
proved successful and led to the establishment of what was called the “Home and
Foreign Missionary Board.”
Provided with a minute for religious
service from the Stuart Monthly Meeting and the Bear Creek Quarterly Meeting, a
minister named Evi Sharpless laid before the Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends, in
1881, “a concern that had been resting on his mind for some years, to visit in
gospel love some of the West India Islands, and to labor there as an
evangelist”. The request was heard in a joint session, men and women sitting
together, and after “prayerful deliberation” on this new departure Sharpless
was liberated for the service.(341)
Those who were acquainted with the
early history of Quakerism were well aware of the role which the founders of
the faith had played in those western seas: as early as 1662 two Quaker ministers,
Ann Robinson and Oswell Heritage, had preached the Quaker message on the island
of Jamaica, and nine years later George Fox himself was there. By the beginning
of the eighteenth century it is said that on this island alone there were
nearly ten thousand followers of the Quaker faith. But long before Sharpless or
the Iowa Friends had ever dreamed of these fields for personal service almost
every trace of the Quakers on the island had been obliterated.(342)
Accompanied by William Marshall of Bangor,
Sharpless sailed from New York early in November, 1881, and after a six days’
voyage landed in Jamaica. Marshall soon returned, but Sharpless remained and
itinerated from place to place, preaching and working in company with the
Presbyterian, Baptist, and Wesleyan missionaries on the island. In the spring
of 1883, however, he launched out for himself, and high up among the mountains
in a temporary booth covered with green banana leaves as a shield from sun and
rain he established his first Quaker mission at Cedar Valley.
While Sharpless labored thus,
Marshall, at the Iowa Yearly Meeting in 1883, told in such forceful language of
the Jamaica field that his hearers were deeply stirred. The following
resolution, first unanimously adopted by the Missionary Association”, was in
turn approved by the Yearly Meeting, thus bringing the Iowa Yearly Meeting of
Friends into definite relations with the work of foreign missions:
Resolved, That in view of the
demand for missionary work I Jamaica we feel that the time has come for Friends
to establish and support a Mission Station on that island, and we recommend
that Friends of Iowa Yearly Meeting consider it their special field.(343)
Among the listeners on this occasion
were Jesse and Elizabeth R. Townsend, two Friends living at Iowa City, who had
long meditated on a religious call to labor, as they thought, among the
Indians; but learning of this open door, they volunteered for the work in
Jamaica. The Yearly Meeting sent them forth, and on December 14, 1883, they
arrived at their chosen field of labor. Sharpless gladly received them at Cedar
Valley and turned over to them his mission station, while he set out again on
an evangelistic tour.
In the forepart of January, 1885,
Sharpless, for a second time, entered the home of his friend Dr. Waldron at the
extreme end of the island; and on the following Sunday morning, with hymn book
and Bible in hand, and with two of the Waldron boys at his side, he marched
down the long street of the village announcing his intended service at the
other end of the town. A crowd soon gathered out of the huts and from over the
palm-clad hills. Then, with a “high moss covered rock” for a pulpit, he
preached his sermon, and within two weeks thereafter, it is said, the people
had built a meeting-house of “sticks from the mountains” and “a roof of
cocoanut leaves”, and called it Happy Grove.(344)
During these years a missionary
spirit, no doubt largely aroused by the evangelistic movement at home, seemed
to be developing among the Iowa Friends. Side by side with the Missionary
Association, the women of the Yearly Meeting organized a Women’s Foreign
Missionary Society, on identically the same plan, for aggressive missionary
work. The Sunday schools, also, caught the spirit, and by 1884 out of a total
of eighty-two such schools in the Yearly Meeting fifty were contributing
monthly to the missionary fund, which collections for the year amounted to
$969.93.(345)
The Christian Endeavor
also took up the work, and with the combined strength of all these agencies the
funds raised for the Jamaica field rose from $2381.63(346) in 1887 to over $14,000(347) in 1906. For the entire period from 1883 to
1913 the Yearly Meeting through all of its agencies has expended over $143,000
in the work.
In 1893 the Iowa Yearly Meeting sent
Gilbert L. Farr of Oskaloosa to Jamaica to superintend the Friends’ mission
stations and to extend the work. Fortunately, some months before, Arthur H.
Swift of Worcester, Massachusetts, then a young man of power and deep devotion,
arrived on the island to take charge of the Seaside School and mission. Hand in
hand these two men worked, aided by the other missionaries. Meeting-houses and
schools were built and out-stations located at advantageous points. Moreover,
valuable properties were bought as investments to provide a means of future support.(348) Through persistent effort the ignorance and
immorality prevailing on every hand(349) gradually gave way and scores of natives came
into the Quaker fold.
Worn with ceaseless toil and anxious
to educate their boys, Gilbert L. Farr and his wife returned to Iowa in 1903,
leaving in the island Arthur Swift, who had earlier taken over the
superintendency. In that same fall the Mission Board gave to the Yearly Meeting
the following statement of the work:
We thankfully report a year of
great blessing in the Jamaica work. There are now 569 members in the three
Monthly Meetings [Glen Haven, Amity Hall and Seaside]—a net increase of 39 the
past year. There are 1040 scholars enrolled in the Sabbath Schools, about 200
members, including Juniors, or the Christian Endeavor societies, and over 500
scholars in the days of schools.
Furthermore, the funds raised in the
island itself for the work during the year amounted to $1,950.(350)
With the zeal which marks the true
missionary Swift grappled with his problems, inspiring those about him to
increased effort through his own example. In order to bring about more united
and more efficient work, a weekly council of all the workers, both American and
native, was held at Seaside, where reports from the various stations were read
and discussed.
On Saturday, June 26, 1909, Swift
responded to a call to address a large union missionary gathering at Morant
Bay, some twenty miles from his home. For many days he had been under a nervous
strain, and in his address that day those present seemed to perceive a peculiar
touch of pathos.(351) When descending from the pulpit as the sermon
closed, his sight seemed to fail, a strange malady came upon him, and with all
speed he was taken to the nearby parsonage, where medical assistance was
summoned. The word dispatched to his wife brought her to his side but two hours
before he passed away. “The bell tolling in the night”, says one writer, “was the
first intimation to many of his illness. A company of Seaside Friends started
immediately to walk to Morant Bay. Four miles from Seaside they met Mrs. Swift
and a company of Friends from Amity Hall and Golden Grove who had already
joined her, returning with the corpse. Reaching Hector’s River just after day
light the people thronged out of their houses and wept aloud as the company
passed, many following to the mission yard which was already filled with the
sorrowing ones. All day crowds of people came from far and near to express
their sorrow and sympathy.” “His death”, says the writer, “has produced a
wonderful effect upon people and many lives have been consecrated to God’s
service as a result.”(352) The news was received
with dismay by the Iowa Friends.
It was a sad council meeting of the
missionaries on the island of Jamaica on July 5th. With rare
courage, however, “H. Alma Swift supplied the vacant place”;(353) and by unanimous consent has continued to
fill it, crowning the work of her husband with complete success. Under her
immediate direction as Superintendent the following missionaries are at work at
present in the Jamaica field, in addition to Alsina M. Andrews, Matron of the
Happy Grove School for girls: Mary E. White, Sada M. Stanley, Alice Kennedy,
Jefferson W. and Helen F. Ford, Lizzie Allen, Anna Sherman, and Charles and
Anna Kurtzholz. The field itself, and the various centers with their respective
memberships in 1912 stood as follows: “Seaside, 711; Amity Hall, 278; Orange
Bay, 73; Glen Haven, 126; Annotto Bay, 68; Middle Quarter, 83; St. Maria, 21;
total, 1360.”(354)
While the Orthodox Friends of Iowa
had thus for years been working out their foreign missionary problem,(355) other Yearly Meetings had developed fields in
Asia, Africa, and in many islands of the sea.(356) Owing to their earlier experience with the advantages of
cooperation in the negro and Indian work, the consciousness gradually grew that
here, too, a union would give added strength. To that end a move was made in
1879;(357) but not until 1894 was the “American Friends’
Board of Foreign Missions” established.(358) By this means the
mission work of the Friends was brought into harmonious unity and into touch
with the greater world movements of the day. In 1911 the Iowa Yearly Meeting
authorized the transference of its Jamaica charge to the management of the
American Board.(359) According to the present plan the Iowa
Friends, still responsible for the maintenance of the Jamaica field, work
through a “Foreign Missionary Committee” appointed by them,(360) which committee is
subordinate to the directions of the American Board.
338- Pumphrey’s Missionary Work in Connection with the Society of
Friends (Philadelphia, 1880), p. 13.
339- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1879, p. 21.
340- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,1880,
p. 17.
341- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1881, p. 9.
342- Bowles’s Jamaica and Friends’ Missions, pp. 49-51.
343- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1884, pp. 30, 32.
344- Bowles’s Jamaica and Friends’ Missions, pp. 56, 57.
345- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1887, p. 32.
346- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1906, p. 26.
347- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1906, p. 26.
348- In 1889 the “Happy Grove Estate”, consisting of about 150
acres, was purchased by the Yearly Meeting for $2,100. See Bowles’s Jamaica and
Friends’ Missions, p. 116. In 1903 the Haining estate of 866 acres and 60
head of cattle was also purchased for about $8,000. See Minutes of Iowa
Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends, 1903, p. 58.
349- Relative to the immorality on the island of Jamaica Jesse
George, an Iowa Missionary, says of the Hordley and Amity Hall districts: “I
should think 95 percent of the adult population were living together
indiscriminately, regardless of the marriage tie.”—Bowles’s Jamaica and
Friends’ Missions, p. 82. Gilbert L. Farr also observes “that more than
sixty per cent. of births are out of wedlock.” This was one of the most
difficult problems which the Christian missionaries in Jamaica had to meet. See
Farr’s Friends’ Mission in Jamaica, p. 1.
350-Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1903, p. 54.
351- Western Work, Vol. XIII, August, 1909, p. 21.
352- Letter of Alsina Andrews to Josepha Hambleton, July 5, 1909.
353-Minutes of the Jamaica Mission Council, July 5, 1909.
354- Farr’s Friends’ Mission in Jamaica, pp. 23, 24.
355- With the rise in the interest of the Iowa Friends in foreign
missions came a corresponding decline in the work of home missions until at the
present time there is almost no real organized home mission work being done
among the Orthodox or other bodies of Friends in Iowa.
356- The various American Yearly Meetings of Orthodox Friends now
maintain missions in Japan, East and West China, India, Palestine, Africa,
Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, and Alaska. See Minutes of the Five Years
Meeting of the Friends in America, 1912, p. 42.
357- Pumphrey’s Missionary Work in Connection with the Society of
Friends, 1894, p. 38.
358- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends, 1894,
p. 38.
359- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends,
1911, p. 69.
360- The “Foreign Mission Committee” now consists of “three members
of the American Friends’ Board of Foreign Missions appointed by the Yearly Meeting
for five years, seven members appointed by the Yearly Meeting for one year to
be nominated as follows: five by the Yearly Meeting Nominating Committee, one
by the W. F. M. S., one by the C. E. Union”.—Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting
of (Orthodox) Friends, 1912, p. 18.