Mary Porter Gamewell
Mary Porter was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on October
20, 1848. Both of her well-to-do parents, Nathaniel Porter and Maria
Killingley Porter, had been born and raised in England and later met
and married in Pennsylvania. Mary was the second of five children. The
family settled in 1860 in Davenport, Iowa where Mary had the example
of an enterprising mother; Maria Porter had already earned a degree
from the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia in 1859. When the Civil
War broke out, Maria Porter helped found the Soldiers' Orphans' Home
Mary Porter herself was educated in public schools in Allegheny and
Davenport, graduating from high school in the Iowa town in 1868 after
taking a year off to teach at the Soldiers' Orphans' Home when it was
moved to Davenport. From there she spent two years teaching a variety
of subjects at the Grandview Academy nearby. By then she had determined
on a career as a missionary and joined the two year old Woman's Foreign
Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
She arrived in China in late 1871 and took up the work of beginning
a school for young female converts at the Methodist Mission in Beijing
(Peking). The Methodist mission to China was still in its early days,
having been only in the capital since 1869. After twelve years of continuous
work in north China, she met and married fellow Methodist missionary
Francis Dunlap Gamewell, a recent New Jersey graduate of Dickinson College
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and almost ten years her junior. Despite her
seniority, her marriage meant that she was no longer a part of the Woman's
Mission and she became attached to her husband's work. Accordingly,
when he was appointed as Superintendent of the West China Mission in
1884, she left her school and followed. This missionary effort soon
ended with the riots in Chongquing (Chungking) which expelled all the
Christian missions from the city in July, 1886.
First Mary, and then her husband, returned to the United States. Frank
studied physics at Columbia University for a time, and then the couple
returned to China, where Frank taught at the Beijing University and
Mary returned to her work with girl's education. Mary's health had,
however, begun to deteriorate and she spent some time in the United
States in 1896. The couple was due for another leave of absence away
from China in the summer of 1900, but they were trapped in the city
for the duration of the Boxer Rebellion and the celebrated siege of
the foreign legations. Gamewell played an important part in the defense
of the British Legation, and Mary Porter Gamewell maintained a detailed
account which later was published.
In August 1900, after the siege was lifted, Mary left Beijing and China.
She never returned. Her health was, by this time, ruined. Although she
was active in writing and raising money for missionary efforts, she
never fully recovered her health, and she died from a series of strokes
in the home of her sister in New Jersey on November 27, 1906.
Please visit the following link for materials authored
by Mary Porter Gamewell maintained in the Their Own Words database:
Gamewell, Mary Porter, 1848-1906.