The Founding of the Female Foreign Mission Society of Greenwich in 1815

by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
Greenwich Time. Looking Back: 1996

A watercolor by Mary E. Mason of the Second Congregational Church, Greenwich, in the early 19th century. 

On Wednesday, April 5, 1815, a circle of Greenwich's Congregationalist women gathered to organize one of the town's earliest voluntary associations. They met at the home of the Rev. Dr. Isaac Lewis, pastor of the Second Congregational Church, and they called their group "The Female Foreign Mission Society of Greenwich."

The Second Congregational Church, Greenwich, Connecticut. This edifice was built in 1858. 

This was at the dawning of that period that swept America known as the Second Great Awakening. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had been created to send forth missionaries to "heathen" lands. 

As Sarah Lewis of Greenwich wrote in 1815:

"It is the duty of those who enjoy the precious privileges of that Gospel to make vigorous and untried efforts for its propagation among the benighted heathen. That this glorious and happy event maybe hastened when you can no longer admit of the doubt."

The gravestone of Miss Sarah Lewis in the Lewis Family Cemetery off Lafayette Place. 

Of course, funds were needed for these missionary efforts. The ladies of Greenwich, like numerous others elsewhere, solicited funds from the community – and from their own pocketbooks.

Lewis served for 20 years as secretary of this group, and her recorded reports are eloquent and detailed, sprinkled with observations about individuals and missionary activities throughout North America, Asia, the Middle East and the North Pacific. The Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut was also the subject of their varied interests.

The Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut. 

It was here that young men of Cherokee, Hawaiian and other ancestries were trained to return to their homelands and preach Christianity.

Miss Lewis said in 1822 of the efforts of women: 

"In every country unenlightened by divine truth, the female sex are considered as an inferior race of beings, kept in a state of slavish subjugation and often treated with the utmost cruelty. Ignorant and miserable, degraded to the lower scale of intelligent beings, they are left a prey to vice without one ray of light to guide them through the dark labyrinths of error and superstition, without one beam of hope to cheer them… and such, but for divine revelation, would have been our condition.

"It is this which has elevated us to that rank in society which we now sustain and given us a title to all the blessings of civilized life, that has opened us to the sources of knowledge, called into exercise the dormant faculties of the mind and rendered us capable of intellectual enjoyment." 

These ladies, with clear minds and heads held up high, dedicated their duty to serve God and their fellow men and women.

One of the later members of the society, Charlotte Close, left Greenwich in 1838 as Mrs. Horton O. Knapp to serve as a missionary teacher in Hawaii. Her mother, Sally Close, had been a member of the society, as well.

There are moving tributes to deceased members of the society, such as Elizabeth Stillson. Sarah Lewis wrote of her: 

"Long will be the name of Elizabeth Stillson be had and grateful remembrance! Long shall we delight to cherish the recollection of her virtues."

These ladies were just one part of a much larger movement to spread Protestant Christianity to the outermost reaches of the world. They celebrated progress and lamented the trials faced by missionaries and faraway lands. The women of the Female Foreign Mission Society were organized and vigorous in their efforts to support their cause. 

The same tradition of volunteerism continues today, making the Town of Greenwich a better place to live and work.

Jeffrey Bingham Mead is a free-lave writer and direct descendent of one of the town's  founding families. He grew up in backcountry Greenwich.