Lottie knew that Tarleton Crawford’s life had been difficult in Tengchow, but she partly blamed the Foreign Mission Board for his breakdown. In their nearly twenty-five years of missionary service in China, the Crawfords had never been allowed to return home on furlough. All they had been allowed was one short vacation to Japan. Was it any wonder that Tarleton Crawford had fled back to the United States for a break?
Lottie was convinced that the Southern Baptists could do a much better job helping their missionaries stay healthy in body and mind while on the mission field. Current mission policies needed to be reformed to reflect the realities a missionary faced every day. When she accompanied Edmonia home, Lottie had raised the issue with the Foreign Mission Board of missionaries being allowed to take a furlough. She decided it was now time to once again stir up the board over the issue. She knew that change would not happen overnight, and she was prepared to keep pushing, even if it took a lifetime.
Again Lottie resorted to paper and pen. She fired off her first volley, a letter to the Foreign Mission Board urging it to consider furloughs for missionaries rather than sending them out for life and making them feel like second-class Christians if their health failed and they had to return home. In her letter she wrote, “It is as if you were saying to a soldier you were sending to the front, ‘Do battle with the enemy. Mind, no furloughs! We expect you to fall on the field.’ ”
While she waited for a response to her letter, Lottie became busier than ever. Now that Tarleton Crawford was gone, Lottie, Martha Crawford, and Sallie Holmes had taken over his work responsibilities in addition to their own. Things soon got worse. Sallie, who still had not heard anything from her son, Landrum, spent much of her time in a daze wondering whether he was dead or so busy at school that he had forgotten to contact his mother. Not knowing was causing Sallie to become more and more depressed. In the end, she could barely get out of bed each morning, and with great regret, Lottie arranged for her to be sent home. Sallie left Tengchow in August 1881. It was a sad day for Lottie. The two women had become close friends. Sallie had taught Lottie much about Chinese culture and how to relate to the people.
Sallie’s departure left only two Baptist women in all of North China, and Lottie felt keenly the weight of trying to do everything. At first she and Martha divided the workload between them, but before long, Lottie came to the conclusion that they desperately needed more workers. She wrote another of her stirring letters to the Foreign Mission Board pointing out that they now had only two missionaries working among the three million people in the region.
Before the year was over, they received at least one more worker. Tarleton Crawford returned from his roaming, looking a little better physically. However, he was very critical and rude to everyone, especially his wife. Indeed, it wasn’t too long before Martha Crawford herself began to have a breakdown, and she returned to the United States for a break, leaving Tarleton and Lottie to battle on with the work.
Lottie sent out more pleas for helpers, and finally in January 1882, two single men, Weston Halcomb and Cicero Pruitt, were sent to answer the call. Lottie was overjoyed. They were the first new missionary faces she had seen since her arrival in China nearly nine years before. She was even more pleased when she discovered the two young men were natural evangelists, eager to go with her into the villages to preach. They both learned quickly, and soon Lottie had them talking to the men while she talked to the women and children.
Ida Tiffany joined the group, too. She was a Presbyterian missionary who had sailed from the United States with Weston and Cicero. Ida, whom Lottie liked a great deal, and Cicero had fallen in love on the voyage, and Ida had decided to become a Baptist. The two of them were married soon after they arrived.
As far as Lottie was concerned, things were looking up. Young people, both men and women, were coming forward to fill the missionary ranks.
By now Lottie had moved into Sallie Holmes’s old compound. The compound consisted of three 300-year-old houses that were surrounded by a common wall. The houses in the compound were simple, with paper windows and dirt floors, but Lottie made them into a comfortable home and a place to host the new missionaries while they adjusted to the local culture. The place soon became known as the “Little Crossroads.”
The year 1883 brought more changes. Lottie’s girls school had been going well, but in the spring, a serious outbreak of disease swept across the region, and the girls were sent home with the hope that their lives would be spared from the ravages of the illness. While the girls were gone, Lottie thought a lot about what she really wanted to do in China. Although the school had produced some good results, Lottie could not stop thinking about all the illiterate women in the villages who needed to hear the gospel. Every day she longed to be in the villages, especially now that she had two young missionary men to talk to the men. She began to dream of a long chain of mission stations stretching from one end of Shantung province to the other. Instead of reopening the girls school, which influenced about thirty girls and their families, Lottie decided to concentrate fully on her work among the villages.
Lottie also received some sad news from home. Her sister, Dr. Orianna Andrews, had died after becoming sick with cancer. She left behind her husband and six sons. She had actually given birth to twelve sons in the course of her life, but six of them had died in infancy. Lottie worried about how Edmonia would take the news. In her letters Eddie often sounded depressed.
In 1884 another resident came to live at the Little Crossroads. Mattie Roberts had been sent out by the mission board to be Lottie’s assistant. Lottie was glad to have another single woman working with her. It had been three years since Sallie Holmes had left. However, the situation didn’t last long. Weston Halcomb began to pay attention to Mattie Roberts. Soon the two were married, and Lottie was in need of another assistant.
At the same time, the Southern Baptist missionaries in Tengchow decided it was time to put their new plan into action. They headed out to staff the chain of mission stations that Lottie had dreamed about across Shantung province. The Pruitts and the Halcombs set out for Hwanghsien, a village about 120 miles from Tengchow. The next step in the plan called for Lottie to move farther south to the town of P’ingtu. Before she could leave, however, Ida Pruitt became ill, and Lottie went to Hwanghsien to nurse her. Sadly, the young missionary bride who had arrived with such high hopes two years before died. Her death made forty-four-year-old Lottie even more determined to make a difference in China with however much of her life was left.
In December 1885, Lottie finally headed south to P’ingtu, a town far from the safety and authority of the treaty ports that had been set up to protect foreigners in China. She set off in a shentze, bracing herself for the journey ahead. She was the first Southern Baptist woman ever to be given permission to open up a new mission station alone, and she was determined to do her best. She also knew she was going into dangerous land. There were no other foreigners in P’ingtu. In fact, a Presbyterian missionary had lived there for a while, but he had been unable to adjust to living so far from other Westerners and had asked to be sent back to a coastal port. The people of P’ingtu had never seen a white woman before, and Lottie knew this would mean another round of questions, prodding, and poking for her. But she was ready to face whatever lay ahead.
Following the shentze was a caravan of mules carrying Lottie’s belongings. Lottie had thought long and hard about what to take with her, knowing she would not have access to anything European until the summer, when she had promised to return to Tengchow for a visit. Eventually she had decided to take her own bedding and mattress to make the k’ang more comfortable, some Greek and Latin books to keep her mind stimulated, flour, sugar, coffee, and a large supply of Chinese gospel tracts and hymnbooks. The tracts and hymnals were packed into a wooden trunk that two of the mules carried slung between them. The trunk would serve as a table, the only piece of furniture Lottie would have once she arrived in P’ingtu.
Also traveling with Lottie were Mr. and Mrs. Chao, two Christians from Tengchow who had volunteered to help her set up the new mission station.
Lottie had divided the trip into four days of traveling thirty miles each day. Nights on the journey were spent staying in some of the worst inns Lottie had ever seen. Rats ran around her feet, and ticks and lice crawled all over her body. By the first morning, Lottie had scratched her skin raw.
By the time the caravan of donkeys and shentzes reached its destination, everyone was sore and bruised. After their arrival, Mr. Chao set out to find a home for them to live in. He came back an hour later with a broad smile on his face. “I found my cousin, Chao Teh Shin. He has a house on the western side of town and is willing to rent it to you for twenty-four dollars a year.”
“Did you see the house?” Lottie asked.
“I have just come from there,” Mr. Chao replied. “I think you will like it. There are four rooms in a row.”
Lottie nodded. “Can we go back and look at it together?” she inquired, thinking the house sounded like a hopeful lead.
And it was. The house was very simple, mud brick on the outside, with a thatched roof and paper windows and dirt floors and smoke-blackened walls inside, but Lottie liked it right away. It looked to be in good repair with no telltale water stains on the rafters, and it was in a bustling part of town.
“I’ll take it,” Lottie said, already thinking of how to turn the empty house into a home. The last room on the left had the k’ang in it. “We’ll use this room as the meeting room during the day, and I’ll sleep here at night,” she said as she motioned for one of the coolies to bring in her mattress and bedding. “The next room must be the kitchen, of course,” she continued, eyeing the hole where the heat from the stove would go to heat the airspace under the k’ang. Like most Chinese homes, the house had been rented without a stove, and soon Lottie had coolies unloading the stove she had brought with her. She decided the last two rooms would be a storeroom and an entryway. The Chaos arranged to stay nearby at another cousin’s house.
Within a couple of days Lottie had everything set up the way she wanted it. Fresh straw covered the dirt floor, pale blue paper covered the blackened walls, and her trunk was set up beside the k’ang to serve as a table.
Once everything was taken care of, Lottie sat and waited. She did not go out into the streets and preach or go visiting her neighbors. This time she had a new strategy. She had decided that missionaries often made a big impression when they went out into the streets, but they did not make many friends. Instead, Lottie decided to stay at home and wait for the curious residents of P’ingtu to come to her.
To aid her in this process, Lottie had a “secret weapon”: sugar cookies! The people in this part of China did not have flour made from wheat, but Lottie had brought six 20-pound sacks with her. She decided to use some of the flour to make cookies for the neighborhood children. Back in Virginia, no child could resist the offer of a freshly baked cookie, and Lottie suspected children in P’ingtu would be no different. As soon as the stove was properly installed, she set about making her first batch of sugar cookies. When they were cooked, she put them on a plate and walked outside her new house. As she did so, hands reached out to touch her clothing, and an old woman poked her arm.
“Would you like to try a cookie?” Lottie politely asked the people around her.
