Carleton Mission / Carleton-in-China Collection | Carleton College Archives

The Carleton Mission was organized in 1903, due largely to the efforts of recently-graduated alumni Watts O. Pye ‘03 and Percy T. Watson ‘03, to support missionary work in China under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Within a few years the locus of that support became the American Board's Fenchow [Fenzhou; later Fenyang] station, in Shansi [Shanxi] province. This was originally an Oberlin College-supported station which Carleton was subsequently permitted first to share responsibility for, and eventually to adopt entirely while Oberlin focused on its sister station in nearby Taiku [Taigu]. In 1907, Pye arrived in Fenchow to take up the evangelistic work interrupted at that station in 1900 by the Boxer rebellion. Two years later, Pye was joined at Fenchow by three missionaries with Carleton ties: classmates Percy and Clara (French) Watson, and Miss Gertrude Chaney, who a few years later married Mr. Pye. Mission staff continued to expand, but these four were at the heart of the Fenchow station until Watts Pye's untimely death in 1926.

The Fenchow mission complex grew after 1909 to include a church, schools, and a hospital. Dr. Watson's hospital, as the only such health agency at work in China's great northwest, was long the sole provider of hospital services to a population over one-twentieth that of the United States. Its staff eventually included two other doctors who were Carleton graduates, Clara A. Nutting '14 and Jean A. Curran '16. Dr. Watson distinguished himself in battles against recurring outbreaks of plague, and during his quarter-century of service at his hospital was six times decorated by the Chinese government for his work.  Schools associated with the Fenchow mission included the Ming I Middle School, schools for men's and women's adult education, a Bible training School, grammar and elementary schools, and a kindergarten. Another Carleton alumna, Miss Josie E. Horn '11, long had charge of the Lydia Lord Davis School for Girls.

At Carleton, the Mission Board first supported a representative in China from 1904 to 1906, when Mary Reynolds '04 took up a post as tutor to the children of the Empress Dowager's family. In Fenchow, the Carleton Mission supported part of the salaries of Dr. and Mrs. Watson from 1909 to 1922, and also of three successive teachers supported in association with the Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior, Ruth W. Tolman '15, Vera M. Holmes '18, and Helen P. Gallagher '22.

In 1918, the Carleton Mission Board determined to adopt as its focus for support the educational work at Fenchow. Under the Carleton-in-China plan begun in 1922 and lasting into the 1940s, Carleton regularly sent student representatives to teach English, usually on overlapping two-year appointments. These “C-in-C reps,” most of whom taught at the Ming I Middle School, were usually sent after their junior year at Carleton, with the expectation that they would return to Carleton for a final student year after their time in China. The complete list of such representatives is as follows:

                        1922-25            J. Larry Krause  [Carleton-supported first two years]

                        1924-27            Erwin A. Hertz

                        1926-27            Ellis C. Yale

                        1926-28            Sarah W. Beach

                        1928-29            Everett A. Sandburg

                        1928-30            Edward C. Rosenow, Jr.

                        1929-31            William J. Bakken

                        1930-32            Richard E. P. Youtz

                        1931-33            J. Stanley Stevens

                        1932-34            Marshall O. Eck

                        1933-35            Robert E. Nugent

                        1934-35            Justus J. Geist (unofficial)

                        1935-36            Bernice Brown (paid own expenses)

                        1935-37            Carl B. Huber

                        1936-39            John R. Caton

                        1937-39            Paul Clifford Domke

                        1939-42            John M. Hlavacek (stayed on longer, but not as Carleton rep)

                        1939-41            J. Rhodes Longley

                        1941-43            Thomas R. Wiener

                        1947-48            Fern A. Larson

                        1948                  Philip M. Martin

The Fenchow station was, of course, always subject to the sometimes tumultuous events taking place in the world around it. In 1927, as a Chinese communist army moved into Shansi province and prepared to occupy Fenchow, all missionaries and their families, save Dr. Watson, were sent to safety in Korea. Watson was threatened with death and a suit of his clothes was burned in effigy by the communists, but, as Watson later recalled, they "became more friendly" after the hospital provided medical treatment for a number of soldiers and officers. The Watson family eventually returned to the U.S. in the mid-1930s.

Following the Japanese invasion of Shansi province in 1937, the Ming I Middle School moved south for some months, returned to Fenyang, and then was overrun when the city fell suddenly in February 1938. The school was essentially disbanded for a time, with students that had escaped Fenyang scattered in various locations, some becoming soldiers while others enrolled together in a government school accepting refugee students from China's war zones. One Ming I remnant joined with the Oberlin-connected Ming Hsien school, which reestablished itself first in Shensi [Shaanxi] province and later in Szechuan [Sichuan] province. For a period there were two Ming I's in operation, as the Fenyang school was reopened under Japanese occupation. During part of that time, one Carleton-in-China representative was teaching with the combined Ming Hsien/Ming I group in Shensi and Szechuan while the other had returned to Japanese-occupied Shansi.

World War II brought a major interruption in the program, and no new Carleton-in-China representative was sent out from 1942 through 1946. When the program was revived in 1947, Fern Larson ’47 was sent to teach at Yü Ying Academy in Peking [Beijing], followed by Philip Martin ’48 in 1948. But continuance soon became untenable in the face of the impending Communist victory, and both Carleton representatives were evacuated home in November 1948.

After 1950, Carleton-in-China reconstituted itself, in somewhat different form, into Carleton Abroad and then Carleton-in-Japan.

            Presidents or Chairmen of the Carleton Mission Board / Carleton-in-China Board

                        1903-06            James W. Strong

                        1906-08            William H. Sallmon

                        1908-09            James W. Strong

                        1909-22            Donald J. Cowling

                        1922-24            Edwin B. Dean

                        1925-27            Franz W. Exner

                        1927-32            Jacob Balzer

                        1932-42            Axel Vestling

                        1943-46            (did not meet)

                        1947-48            Philip H. Phenix

                        1949-50            James C. Flint

                        1950                Philip H. Phenix