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Washington Evening Journal
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Carnegie Museum revamps display on Fairfield missionaries
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
FAIRFIELD – Carnegie Historical Museum Research Assistant Charlotte Wright dedicated the past year of her life to researching, finding artifacts and designing an exhibit on local missionaries that is now on display on the museum’s third floor.
The museum previously displayed an exhibit on Fairfield missionaries that was a hodgepodge of the items they brought back from all over the world. Wright and museum director Jake Schmidt decided to revamp the exhibit by focusing on one country at a time. While she was inventorying all the artifacts and books in the museum’s missionary collection, Wright saw that one missionary couple had a story so extraordinary that it needed to take center stage in the new display.
The tale of the Rev. Charles W. McCleary and his wife Myrtle “Myrtie” Kirby is both inspiring and tragic. The two were Presbyterian missionaries in the West African nation of Cameroon, and although they each accomplished so much, their time together was painfully short.
Charles was a native of Crawfordsville and a graduate of Parsons College in Fairfield. The college was renowned for producing missionaries, and Wright found in her research that by 1900, 87 of the college’s 265 alumni were either missionaries or had entered the ministry. Charles arrived in Cameroon in 1895 when it was still a French colony. Text from the museum display indicates that he and two other men traveled from the coastal city of Batanga to a spot 160 miles inland where they set up a missionary station that they called Elat, meaning “covenant.” Wright said that they proselytized to the native people known as Bulu, and that they built schools, a church, a hospital and started translating the Bible into the Bulu language.
Before leaving for Africa, Charles had begun courting Myrtle, a Fairfield native. The two wrote letters back and forth across the Atlantic for the next six years until Charles finally returned to Iowa. In the meantime, Myrtle had been teaching school in Fairfield and Brighton. The couple wed in 1902, and together they sailed to Cameroon to continue their missionary work as husband and wife. After arriving in Elat in the spring of 1903, this incredible long-distance love story kept aflame for so long through nothing but pen and paper came to a shocking and abrupt end when Charles died of “black water fever.”
The couple had lived together in Africa for less than four months. Myrtle had just begun to learn the Bulu language. Wright notes in her summary that Myrtle was “the only white woman within 60 miles,” but that did not deter her. On his deathbed, Charles pleaded with Myrtle to stay in the country to continue their important work. Despite being thousands of miles from home in a foreign land with no other friends or relatives, Myrtle fulfilled Charles’ wish and decided to stay.
Myrtle’s parents, who did not want her to go to Africa in the first place, begged her to come back. Myrtle did return to the United States but only to visit and give talks on her missionary work. Wright said Myrtle’s work in Africa included teaching and being an organizer, supervisor and spokesperson for the station. Myrtle wrote articles about the Elat station that appeared in missionary magazines, and the museum display includes some of Myrtle’s writing. Elat had a thriving Presbyterian congregation, and in fact it was one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in the world in the early 1900s. Wright said that Myrtle wanted to stay in Africa for the rest of her life and considered it her home, but the Presbyterian Church convinced her to come back to the U.S. upon her retirement in 1940.
About two-thirds of the missionary display is dedicated to the McClearys and includes photos of the couple and the people they worked with in Cameroon. It includes a wicker basket the locals carried food in, plus pottery, musical instruments, a headdress and much more. It even includes an elephant’s tusk, which is now illegal to purchase after the U.S. banned the sale of ivory, but which is still legal to possess as an heirloom. The other third of the display case is devoted to Parson College’s role in promoting missions, and has an extensive list of the missionaries produced by the college as of 1930.
Wright said this was the first exhibit she has ever designed for the museum, and it was both a colossal undertaking and a labor of love. She said the museum’s plan is to feature other missionaries in the exhibit, but this current one will stay up for a few years.
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
