Pip’s Patch

Jemima and Edward Lord’s five children were on the steamer from Shanghai to New York, via Cape Horn, for three months – but it was obviously well worth it for she was so impressed by her sister in law, Esther Lord McNeil and the educational facilities around her home in New York State.

Aunt Esther and her husband, James, were dedicated temperance workers and she became the first county president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in New York State when it was formed in 1873. It was about a month after she married in 1832 that she became a Christian and felt called to care for homeless children. The McNeils never had any children themselves but by the mid 1860s they were caring for eight youngsters. These included Edward and Freelove Lord’s five children (Lucy, William, Franklin, Fannie and Mary) and George and William Bausum. For in 1863 Jemima had decided to go to England collect her boys and take them to live with Aunt Esther. George (below left) was then 13-years-old and William was 11.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In England Jemima had spent time with her daughter, Mary, who was very much part of J Hudson Taylor ’s family. She did manage to raise some support for her work in Ningbo while in England, particularly through George Muller (founder of the orphanages at Ashley Down in Bristol) but fund raising in the States proved to be very difficult because of the Civil War. And when she was in Brooklyn preparing to return to Ningbo she caught diptheria. Jemima didn’t get back to her husband until July 1864 having spent most of the last 14 months at sea.

Dr Lord had been very busy during her absence both with his own work, overseeing the construction of the orphanage, helping those missionaries (like James Meadows) who looked to Hudson Taylor for leadership and acting as vice-consul during the American consul’s absence. He would also survive what was thought to be cholera and, when scarcely off his sick bed, baptised15 converts, 11 of those at the Bridge Street church that he was overseeing for Hudson Taylor. Once back in Ningbo Jemima was soon immersed in more than just her school work.

As the orphanage approached completion she felt frustrated that she could not do more evangelism among the women in and around Ningbo. She began systematically visiting nearby villages with a local Christian worker, Mrs Tsui – known as the “man hunter” for the way she sought to introduce many Chinese to Jesus. Jemima told the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East and Hudson Taylor that the two Biblewomen she worked with had such easy access to so many homes in Ningbo that she didn’t know how to cope with all the work. She wrote that if she had five helpers she could easily give each one a district in which there was ample employment – leaving her free to teach women to read the Scriptures in Romanised colloquial script. Hudson Taylor and his associates in London did recruit an assistant for her but that young woman never settled into the work at the school and soon left. He described Jemima as being the equivalent of one good man!

By 1865 Dr Lord felt that Meadows, after three years in Ningbo, was ready to take responsibility for the Bridge Street church which by then had about 40 members. He was, however, even more impressed by another of Hudson Taylor’s recruits – Stephen Barchet who had arrived in July 1865. Barchet was German and had been converted in London when he was studying medicine. Dr Lord described Barchet as a young man of unusual promise who was more intelligent and more teachable.

Hudson Taylor sent others to Ningbo, including a couple who stayed at Jemima’s school for a while. But the Lords and Meadows were very keen to see the Hudson Taylors themselves return. Maria had, however, been very ill after the birth of her third son, and there was still much to do before they could leave England. They were seeing the impact of the Christian Revival in Europe and by 1865, when they founded the China Inland Mission, they had many applicants to assess. As their plans progressed for a whole team to travel with them to China in 1866 Dr Lord encouraged them by stating that they could all find a home with him and his wife when they first arrived.

That team of 16 new workers included working men, single women and Jemima’s 16-year-old daughter, Mary, whom Hudson Taylor accepted as a missionary. He well knew how effective his own wife had been in Ningbo even though she had been also 16 when she first went to China. This team would pioneer the inclusion of single women and non-ordained men in Christian outreach deep into China. They left England with Hudson and Maria Taylor and their four children in May 1866 on the Clipper Lammermuir and arrived in Shanghai on September 30. Hudson Taylor immediately escorted Mary Bausum and Elizabeth Rose to Ningbo, for the latter was engaged to Meadows. He didn’t take the Lords up on their offer of hospitality for the team – but did continue to cherish their encouragement and support.

Barchet left Hudson Taylor’s team and joined Dr Lord in his work in Ningbo while Mary became her mother’s assistant. It didn’t take long for romance to blossom between Barchet and Mary and they married in November 1868. Sadly Jemima never witnessed the birth of her first grandchild for she died on January 15,1869. Her husband wrote: “She had labored long and well; it was right she should go home to her rest. For seven weeks she bore her severe sufferings with great fortitude and patience, and closed her great battle of life.” He spoke of how dauntlessly, tirelessly and hopefully she had worked – and his sorrow at losing her. Jemima told one of the Biblewomen shortly before her death that she was very well as she was going to her Father’s house and so looked forward to death.

In an obituary about her a newspaper in Fredonia (where the McNeils were living with her children) stated that her school, with almost 50 girls, was the largest and most successful in China. It still exists today but looks very different now that it has been completely rebuilt and modernised. (Above -Jemima’s school. Left – Mary Bausum Barchet in about 1925.)

There would be more sorrow the year after Jemima died as, just after giving birth to her eighth child, Maria Taylor died (that son and three other children pre-deceased her). To Mary she had been like a very special big sister.

Mary Bausum Barchet carried on her mother’s work at the school and the orphanage for a while. In the 1870s the Barchets went to the States where Stephen completed his medical studies and they joined the American Baptist Missionary Union. They returned to China and worked there for the rest of their lives. They had four daughters and one son.

Dr Lord would marry three more times and each wife would die before him. In 1887, 40 years after he first arrived in Ningbo, he and his sixth wife contracted cholera. He was so ill that he never knew that his wife had died – four days before he did. So he and five of his wives were buried in Ningbo.The Bausum boys made their lives in the frontier lands of South Dakota. In August 1885 William married Dr Lord’s daughter, Fannie Adaline, but then had to leave immediately for South Dakota where his brother, George had died suddenly. He brought back George’s son to Aunt Esther. William and Fannie (who had acted as secretary to her father in Ningbo for several years) then went to South Dakota themselves. They had seven children one of whom, Robert Lord Bausum, enjoyed telling his children that his mother’s father married his father’s mother (He Led All The Way pp 20 &36). He was with the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board in China in 1929 when he married Euva Evelyn Majors and their fourth child, Dorothy (Dorothy Lord Bausum  Evans), carried on the family tradition of missionary service.  When Dorothy and her husband, Bobby Dale Evans, retired from the mission field in 2000 it was Joy Bausum who picked up that torch.

The next installment will have eye witness accounts by westerners of what Ningbo was like in the mid 19th century.

Sources:

My thanks to Dan Bausum, Joy Bausum’s father, for providing copies of photographs from the Bausum family archives.

Archives of the Society Promoting Female Education in the East, in the special collection at Birmingham University.

A J Broomhall If I had a Thousand Lives – Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century Vol III Hodder & Stoughton 1982.

Geraldine Guiness The Story of the China Inland Mission, Morgan and Scott, London, 1893

Letters to J Hudson Taylor, including those by E C Lord, in the CIM archives, held in the special collection at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Dorothy Lord Bausum Evans He Led All the Way Xulon Press 2007.

The Ricci Roundtable, website of the Ricci Institute

The Project Gutenberg eBook: Frances W Graham and Georgeanna M Cardenier, Two Decades – A History of the First Twenty Years’ Work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York, 1894. For information about Esther McNeil and the photograph.

Dates:

Jemima Bausum Lord  1818-1869; Edward Clemens Lord 1817-1887; Mary Elizabeth Bausum Lord 1849 – 1926; Stephen Paul Barchet 1843 – 1909; George Frederick Bausum 1850 – 1885; William Henry Bausum 1852 – 1905; Fannie Adaline Lord Bausum 1858 – 1927; James Hudson Taylor 1832 – 1905; Maria Dyer Taylor 1837 – 1870; Robert Lord Bausum 1893 – 1979; Euva E Bausum 1900 – 1966.