Mary
Mary Reynolds, Carleton College class of 1904, was born in Sibley, Iowa on August 21, 1877 to Carlos Pembrook Reynolds – a Civil War veteran turned farmer – and Nancy Jane Eakin, who we unfortunately know little about.
Reynolds would first attend the Northfield Preparatory School and then Carleton College where, “her cheerful unassuming Christian life have been a source of help and inspiration to all who have known her.” Like other women attending college in early twentieth-century America, Reynolds worked “soliciting subscriptions for the Ladies Home Journal” to help finance her final years at Carleton. During this time, she was an avid contributor of poems to the Carletonia (now Carletonian) and is recorded to have written some theater productions. Although her exact intellectual interests are not explicitly apparent, we know she graduated from Carleton with honors and had read some of Marco Polo’s travels, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Chinese Characteristics by Arthur H. Smith (which she would come to find issue with).
Reynolds had a “keen sense of humor” and a “character of exceptional strength.” Which she likely needed when she was selected by the Minister to China in Washington to go to Peking, now Beijing, to tutor the two nephews of the Empress Dowager Cixi of the late-Qing dynasty. Her selection itself is a bit confounding as the newspapers from 1904 (including the NYT, and San Francisco Times) cite Washington as picking Reynolds, but her letters and the Tacoma Times state that established missionary Luella Miner was on the Carleton Mission Board, because her sister went to Carleton, and was told by the Empress Dowager to find her nephews a governess; and thus Miner chose Reynolds herself. Regardless, by early September 1904, Reynolds had agreed to the job.
In October 1904, Reynolds left either Northfield or Sibley for the West Coast, such that she could get on a steam ship bound for China. Like other midwest missionaries, she went through Washington State first where she “spent a very pleasant two days in Tacoma” and then saw Mt. Shasta and Shasta springs on her way to San Francisco. In San Francisco, she met Miss Nellie Russell, another established China missionary, who may have been sent out to escort Reynolds. Together, they boarded the S.S. China – aptly named – with 46 other missionary (one who would come to be her husband!) who she described as “bright, wide-awake, jolly folks.” During their journey, Reynolds records playing shuffleboard, singing various songs, and telling funny stories. She seems to have liked her time on the ship, perhaps her first time on the Pacific, and she remembers how “the sea was beautiful all the time, never very high but always changing. Nearly every evening I went up into the prow to watch the sunset and later to see the phosphorus.”
Like most ships going between East Asia and America at this time, the S.S. China stopped first in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Reynolds conveys sentiments of US imperialism directly pertaining to land ownership as she writes, “it was hard to believe that that picture city with its palm trees and tropical verdure of all kinds really belonged to the U.S., tho[ugh] the street-car line and electric lights “helped some” to make it seem natural.” For Reynolds, Hawai’i had become U.S. territory only four years earlier and so the idea of legal ownership would indeed have been novel. The fact that the street-cars and lights were the convincing semiotics of U.S. acquisition unveils Reynolds’s perspective, in which Honolulu could only be understood as part of the U.S. by its elements of modernization.
Next, the S.S. China found its way to Japan and Reynolds was introduced to Yokohama, Tokyo, Kobe, and Nagasaki. Here, she calls Japanese people “small” and “little.” A sentiment that reflects the late-nineteenth-century American perception of the Japanese people as children or child-like, and thus little. These ideas were initially inspired by early-modern literature like Gulliver’s Travels and perpetuated later by the likes of Percival Lowell’s Darwinian The Soul of the Far East. She also expressed delight in her first rickshaw ride, something that she would continue to enjoy once in Peking.
Reynolds’ writing demonstrates a sense of foreignness towards Honolulu, manifested in her scenery descriptions, Japan, as seen in her attentiveness towards the people, and China, shown in her exaggerating. Her initial descriptions of Hawai’i, Japan, and China betray the negative stereotypes that characterized Reynolds’s worldview. In regard to the Chinese crew on the S.S. China, she calls them “the noisiest people you can imagine, all talk at once, as loud and as fast as they can.”
On November 28, 1904, Reynolds reached Peking as night fell, noting that she could not see the city walls. She was taken to the American Mission Compound by Miss Luella Miner and was placed in the “Ladies House” as her residence.
Reynolds left Peking in June of 1906 to become a missionary in Foochow with her soon-to-be husband, named George Newell – who she met on the boat to China almost two years before. The Foochow Messenger records that George Newell taught astronomy, music, and studied law. On April 24, 1906, Reynolds sent a telegraph that described how they were to be married on June 4th and then vacation in “Han Kan” (Hong Kong), then sail up the “Yantze” (Yangtze) River to go shopping in Shanghai, and finally travel to Foochow via “coast steamer.” The Carleton archives has one letter from during her time in Foochow, from August 30th, presumably only a couple weeks after she settled into her new home. This letter summarizes her past year and does not describe her new location. We are thus left with only small clues as to the rest of her life story.
A 1907 Foochow Messenger article records that “Eight members of the city station have given some time to teaching in the college…Mr. Newell 10 hours, and Mrs. Newell, whom we welcomed to our number in the fall, taught 5 hours a week from the beginning.” Evidently, Mary arrived and was quickly welcomed into her role as teacher alongside her husband. Also in 1907, the Foochow mission published a three-edition hymn book, one in large Chinese characters, one in small characters, and one in romanized Chinese to which “Miss Newell put much care and thought into the work of getting the character hymn and tune book through the press.” In a letter to Carleton President Strong on July 21, 1905, Reynolds describes how part of her motivation to move to the Foochow mission is to increase her language capacity. She feels a sense of responsibility that if she is to be a missionary then she should be able to communicate in Chinese.
An arriving passenger log from September 21, 1919 records that Mary R., George M., Marion J., and Dwight D. Newell arrived at the port of San Francisco from Shanghai on the S.S. Nanking. The log records that Dwight was born in Sibley, Iowa in 1913 but Marion was born in Foochow, China in 1915. The 1913 Foochow messenger wrote that they had received letters saying that the Newells were coming back to the mission, thus we can conclude that the Newell’s resided in Iowa around 1913 but then returned to China before 1915. Another log from June 10, 1927 records that Mary, George, and Marion Newell arrived at the port of San Francisco from Shanghai on the S.S. Siberia Maru. This indicates that Dwight either remained in China or had never left America after 1919. The Foochow messenger from 1924 writes that “Dwight Newell has gone to the North China American school at Tungshien. He is a very fortunate lad in his initial boarding school venture, for his mother is matron this year in the same School and his sister Jean is also there.” Evidently, Dwight would remain and be educated in China.
A log from 1935 records Mary and George arriving in Victoria, B.C. on July 15th from Manila on the S.S. Empress of Russia. The Foochow messenger corroborates this as it notes that the Newell’s were on furlough in 1935. The 1939 Foochow messenger records their presence as the Union High School is moved due to the war. After this, I have yet to find mentions of their lives until a gravestone located in Prospect Hill Cemetery, Uxbridge, Massachusetts records the deaths of Mary in 1968 and George in 1956. Carleton College’s “Alumni Farewells” page records Mary’s death as well. As can be seen by her various journeys back and forth from China and America, her relationship with China evidently continued past her last 1906 letter.
Sources
Ashton, Susanna. “Compound Walls: Eva Jane Price’s Letters from a Chinese Mission, 1890-1900.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 17, no. 3 (1996): 80–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/3346878.
Bieler, Stacey. Patriots or Traitors: A History of American Educated Chinese Students. Oxford: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315706931.
Chin, Carol. “Beneficient Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 3 (2003): 327-352. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24914416.
Hill, Patricia R. The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920. University of Michigan Press, 1985.
Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in turn-of-the century China. Yale University Press, 1984.
Miller, John. “Admiring the New and Old Japan.” In American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama, 28-38. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015.
“American Girl to Teach Chinese Princes English,” The Tacoma Times, July 21, 1904, Tacoma, WA.