In April 1901, things were finally calm enough for Lottie to head back to Tengchow and the Little Crossroads. Most Christians in Tengchow had survived unscathed, and the church was still intact. However, life was not quite so favorable for those Christians in P’ingtu and Sha-ling, where many deaths and beatings and house burnings had taken place.
As part of the surrender agreement with foreign powers, the Chinese government had promised to repay those people whose property was destroyed or damaged by the rampaging Boxers. The Baptist churches in Shantung province asked for only what was a fair price to cover their losses, and not a penny more. This basic honesty and the way in which Christians had endured persecution and even death greatly impressed the local people.
When Lottie returned to Tengchow, she found more doors open to her than ever before. The local people wanted to know what power was so strong that it would cause a Christian to die with dignity and hope. Within a few months, there were over a hundred baptisms of new converts.
The Boxer Rebellion had hit the world headlines, too, and renewed the interest of American Christians in reaching China with the gospel. Once the doors of China were opened to foreigners again, new missionaries began to flood into the country. Lottie was particularly pleased to welcome those who had been called to missionary service as a result of her influence and example. It was the fulfillment of a dream.
Jessie Pettigrew, the first registered nurse ever appointed by the Foreign Mission Board, arrived in Tengchow. She had been raised on stories of Lottie Moon’s heroism and sacrifice. Mary Willeford came, too. As a small girl in Sunday school, she had been inspired by stories of Lottie’s adventures. A doctor, Thomas Ayers, and his family also arrived. Dr. Ayers had asked to be stationed in Hwangshien because he had been moved by the story of the Pruitts, who served there.
Now, at the close of 1901, Shantung province had two medical missionaries, a nurse and a doctor. The next step as far as Lottie was concerned was a hospital for them to work in. Lottie and Dr. Ayers wrote to the Foreign Mission Board asking for seven thousand dollars. If the money was granted, it would fund the board’s first venture into building a hospital.
Lottie had been so busy with her work that she hardly noticed that as 1902 rolled around, it had been nine and a half years since her last furlough. Mainly as a result of Lottie’s influence, the Foreign Mission Board had begun a policy whereby missionaries were to come home on furlough every ten years whether they needed a break or not. Lottie was reluctant to leave her Chinese friends, but she saw the trip as an opportunity to stir up interest in the proposed hospital and raise money for it.
In the summer of 1902, Lottie traveled to Chefoo to have suitable Western clothes made for her. She had been wearing Chinese-style clothing for so long that she had little idea of American fashions. The clothing she ordered from the dressmaker—long, black high-necked dresses and silk bonnets—was hopelessly out of date, but somehow it fit Lottie’s image. Lottie returned to the United States in January 1903, a quaint stranger in a world that had once been her home.
This time, Lottie did not have a house to return to. Two years earlier, Edmonia had sold Bonheur, the house the two sisters had owned, and begun a life of wandering about the South in search of a climate that would bring relief to her various medical ailments. Lottie went to stay with her brother Isaac, who now lived in Crewe, Virginia. The folks at the Baptist church at Crewe were delighted to have such a legendary person as Lottie staying among them.
From Crewe, Lottie fanned out across the countryside to speak to women’s groups and visit old friends and family members. She visited Mamie, her only niece, who was married and living in Norfolk, Virginia. She also saw her sister Orianna’s sons and their families. Most of them now lived in and around Roanoke, Virginia. While Lottie was in Roanoke, Edmonia came to visit her. It was a sad reunion for Lottie, who was shocked at how old and worn her sister looked, despite the fact that Edmonia was ten years younger than Lottie. Eddie acted as if all the good times in life were behind her and only gloom and loneliness lay ahead. Lottie grew concerned over Edmonia’s mental state and hoped that her sister would soon settle down somewhere rather than live in one boardinghouse after another, as she presently did.
Everywhere Lottie went, people pleaded with her not to go back to China. Lottie was now sixty-two years old, and it was obvious that the years of hard pioneering work had taken their toll on her body. However, Lottie would not consider staying in the United States. America was simply not her home anymore; her heart was in China.
While Lottie was in America, a professor arranged for her to attend the University of Virginia commencement ceremonies in the summer of 1903. He also organized for her to go to two formal dinners where President Theodore Roosevelt was the guest speaker. One of the dinners was held at Monticello, the neighboring estate to Viewmont, which Lottie’s uncle had once owned. As Lottie sat down to an eight-course meal, memories of growing up in and around Viewmont and Monticello flooded her thoughts. It all seemed so far away and so different from the life she now led in China. Monticello was a magnificent home, but in Lottie’s mind it did not compare to the Little Crossroads in Tengchow, where Lottie felt at home now. That was where she belonged, sharing the gospel with those who had not yet heard it.
As her year of furlough progressed, Lottie grew dismayed to see how little the Southern Baptists were doing to help the poor black people of the South. Whenever she had the opportunity, Lottie would visit them, bringing food and clothing for the children.
Finally, on February 27, 1904, after thirteen months in the United States, Lottie headed for “home.” She boarded the steamship China in San Francisco. As the harbor faded from view, Lottie thought about the three other times she had left America. On those occasions, she had not known whether she would see friends and family again. This time, she knew for sure that she would never again see some of the people closest to her. Her brother Isaac was in poor health and was not expected to live long, and Edmonia’s condition was deteriorating. Edmonia seemed to have lost the will to go on living. Lottie had heard that this had happened to a lot of southerners who’d had their land and lifestyle ripped away from them in the Civil War. All the family traditions and connections were gone, and Eddie did not appear to have the ability to build new ones.
Many changes had taken place in Shantung province while Lottie was away. One change, which particularly pleased her, was that the citizens of Sha-ling had decided to empty their ancient temple and use the building as a public school. Lottie could not think of a better example of what Christianity could do for a country. These people wanted to leave behind their superstitions and concentrate on the welfare and education of their children.
The missionaries had made numerous changes among themselves as well. Cicero Pruitt had opened a theological school. The school was for men, of course, but plans were in the works for a women-church-workers training school to be run by Mary Willeford, a new missionary. Jesse Owen, another new missionary, was having a great deal of success with evangelism in the countryside, and he, too, had opened a school.
Best of all, in Hwanghsien, the hospital that Lottie and Dr. Ayers had dreamed about was finally under way. The First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia, had provided most of the money for it to be built.
In addition to everything else going on, the Chinese Christians were organizing themselves into groups to address such issues as unbinding women’s feet, evangelism, and running Sunday schools. Lottie was pleased with all the progress that had occurred while she was away, and she began to think about where she could be the most useful.
In the end, Lottie decided that her place was back in education, and she returned to what she had done in the very beginning, setting up and administrating schools. It seemed that after the Boxer Rebellion, everyone wanted to go to school. Lottie remembered the first girls school she had started in Tengchow thirty years before. Then, she’d had to beg for girls to be allowed to attend class. And even then, she was able to attract only those girls who were considered society’s castoffs. Now grown men showed up at school asking how their children could be admitted, and women from the highest families in town sent letters to Lottie requesting that places be set aside for their daughters. To cope with the demand, Lottie purchased more land on North Street to expand the existing school there, which came to be known as Memorial School. She also opened a grade school for small children and encouraged the setting up of a girls school in P’ingtu.
Lottie did not get out into the villages in the countryside as much as she had when she was younger. However, many people from the villages found their way to her house in Tengchow. As many as fifteen women and children at a time would stay with her. They came for medical help, for Christian instruction, or merely because they had heard that the old American woman would give them food and a warm place to sleep. Lottie was delighted to help these women in any way she could. She read the Bible to them and taught them hymns. She even taught many of them to read and then gave them a Bible to take home with them. Of course, hosting these people in her home took a lot of money; the cook had to be paid, food had to be purchased, and fresh matting and coal had to be provided for the k’ang. Despite the cost to her, Lottie accepted everyone who wanted to visit her.
In the years following the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese government went through a period of great upheaval. As a result, one of the things that changed was the old civil service examination that every person who wanted to hold office had to pass. Tengchow had always been one of the cities where these examinations were held, and much of the commerce and money flowing into town came as a result of the students who poured in to prepare for and take the exams. When the civil service exams were abolished, Tengchow lost its place of importance. Many people moved away, and it was decided that the mission’s theological school would relocate to Hwanghsien, close to the new hospital. Most of the Southern Baptist missionaries in Tengchow moved with the school, but not Lottie. There was still work to be done in Tengchow, and the Little Crossroads was a home away from home for hundreds of Chinese Christians. Lottie simply could not move.
Thankfully, about the time everyone else left, two new recruits arrived from the United States: Ella Jeter and Ida Taylor, neither of whom understood a word of Chinese. However, they were eager to learn and serve alongside Lottie in any way they could. By the end of 1906, both Ella and Ida had adapted remarkably well to life in China and were ready to take charge of the girls school, which now had over fifty students.
The following year, Lottie received a letter from her old friend Martha Crawford. The pair had continued to write to each other even through the most difficult of times when Martha’s husband, Tarleton, had left the covering of the Southern Baptists over the policies of the Foreign Mission Board. Now Tarleton was dead, and Martha was free to visit Lottie. When the seventy-seven-year-old missionary arrived in Tengchow, she was as energetic as ever, and soon she and Lottie were holding meetings together around the town.
Martha had a special request for Lottie. When her husband had died, many of the missionaries who had followed him when he split from the Southern Baptists began to question why they had left. They started to realize that a lot of the drive to separate had been based on Tarleton’s bitter talk, and they wanted to set things right with the Foreign Mission Board and come back under the umbrella of the Southern Baptists. Since Lottie was the one missionary who had been able to remain friends with both sides of the dispute, Martha asked her to try to smooth the way for the wayward missionaries to return. Lottie was delighted to do so; she hated to see missionaries fighting among themselves. She wrote a letter to Robert Willingham, the new secretary of the Foreign Mission Board, raising the issue of the missionaries who had followed Tarleton Crawford. As a result, almost all of these missionaries returned to work under the auspices of the Southern Baptists in China.
