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Hi Wendy,
Here are a few additional excerpts on Rev. Partridge from the history of the Swatow mission. You will also get a idea about the Ashmores. If you have a mailing address to send me, I'll be glad to send you a few additional pages I've been able to copy for you (photos, etc.) I had tried scanning unsuccessfully yesterday, but found out today that copying works much better. Just my luck, I had already typed this out! Oh well, glad to do it for you. I know how much it means to me to have this history of my family. I am sure our great-great grandparents worked closely together.
- Marty
Chapter on Educational Work:
"At a business meeting connected with the communion week of November, 1874, one of the native preachers, Hu sin-se, was moderator and took up the matter of schools for the children, both boys and girls, of the native church members. He urged upon the church members their own responsibility for teaching their children. Dr. Ashmore and Mr. Partridge, as well as Mrs. Partridge [Henrietta] and Miss Fielde, were there, and it must have been a source of great joy to sit aside and let a native preacher take the lead in this.
"Mrs. Johnson had left the mission and Mrs. Partridge [Henrietta] had again opened the school for girls, but Hu sin-se wanted the church to take a hand in school work and assume at least a part of the responsibility of carrying it on, and he wanted not only a girls' school bu a boys' school as well. This movement from the church itself was the hopeful sign in this. There were sixty-four dollars available in the treasury of the church and this was divided equally for the salaries of the teachers for the new boys' school and the girls' school. ..."
"During the year 1876, Mr. Partridge put up a building for the boys' school, 91 feet long by 28 feet wide and one story high, having accommodations for twenty pupils, at a cost of $600 Mex. A second story was put on the buidling in 1887 at a cost of $592.29."
(Note: Care of the boys' school was given over from Miss Fielde in 1880 to William Ashmore, Jr.
Chapter on The Abigail Hart Scott Memorial School, Kakchieh: (Note: I am providing more detail that I think will be of interest to you and give you a small picture of what their life was like and the kind of work your great-great grandmother was involved in at the girls' school.)
"When Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were still working in Hongkong in the year 1851, sixty nine years ago, Mrs. Johnson opened a girls' school in the lower story of her dwelling house. The first pupil was a Hakka girl from a family living in Hong Kong. While in school she became a Christian. Later she was married to a heathen but always kept her faith in God. The second girl to enter was A Tiam, a child eight years old, from Iam-tsau, here on our own field. She was an unwelcome daughter and had been given to Mr. Lechler, a missionary who was working in the Iam-tsau region, who brought her to Hongkong. When she was eighteen years old her father came and took her home and married her to a heathen. Another girl was A Hi whose family drifted to Hongkong, the father going on to California. The mother heard of the school and brought herdaughter to study, no doubt influenced by the fact that she would have one less child to support. She was the brightest girl in the school, and could learn anything. Chaun Sin-se-nie still living in Penang, and A Sui Che still living in Kakchieh, were pupils in this school. These two were from Christian families, and have proved to be very useful women in our mission. The teacher of this school was a heathen, and his salary was eight dollars a month.
When the mission moved to Double Island, the school was kept up. The new teacher, Chuan Sini-se was a Christian young man. A girl who studied in Hongkong helped in the teaching.
When the move was made to Kakchieh the school came too, as a matter of course, and was continued in the house at Kakchieh, where the Johnsons lived while building their home on the compound. When this house was finished, the school occupied the lower story.
Mrs. Johnson thought Chuan Sin-se needed a wife, so she sent to one of the Christian families in Hongkong whose daughter had been in her school there, inviting the daughter to come to Swatow and visit her. She came, and Chuan Sin-se found the wife he needed.
Some of us can remember A Khue Che, the efficient helper in the Woman's School, and afterwards in the hospital, and A Ka Che, mother of Hui Pe Che. These two women were also in Mrs. Johnson's school.
A short time after Mr. Johnson's death, Mrs. Johnson removed to Tang- O with the school, but the next year she left the mission and the school was closed.
Mrs. Henrietta Partridge opened the school again in the autumn of 1874. There was now a church constituency to help in carrying on a school under different rules. At first everything had been done by the girls. The food was furnished and a cook prepared it. Their clothes were also furnished and a laundress kept them clean, and the girls had no responsibility except to get their lessons. In the new school Mrs. Partridge allowed $1.30 a month for the board of each girl, but they had to do the cooking, cleaning and washing, as well as keeping the whole place in order. This was a first step, though a short one, towards self-support.
The Woman's Society of the East made an appropriation of $150 for carrying on the school and $400 for a school building. While this was being built, the school lived in the Koi-tiu-lau, a small building in the valley, the first one built on the compound. Mr. Partridge put up the school building, and here the school found its first real home. It consisted of a school room and dining room, with two dormitories above. A one-story bath room and storeroom, with a covered open kitchen, were at the back. A few years later a second story was built over this. But this house could accommodate only thirty two and was soon outgrown, so plans were made for a larger building. After consulting with others, Mrs. Ashmore, who had charge of the school at the time, asked the Society for the modest sum of $1000 gold, promising to furnish an additional $600 Mexican receive from the sale of drawn work [embroidery], the making of which she had introduced among our church members. This was a business venture of her own, and the work on every piece was paid for at its full value. The school girls were not allowed to do this work, as it would have been too hard on their eyes, and also because their desire to earn money would have taken time from their other duties. The facts in this case have been misunderstood and incorrectly stated in some accounts that have appeared in print at home.
The new building was put up, and finished in 1899, just as the Ashmores left for furlough. The whole cost of the building, $3,658, was furnished by Mrs. Ashmore alone from her drawn-work earnings, and the $1,000 voted by the Society were never drawn, but were returned to the Society. Later when this building was outgrown, and the need for more recitation rooms for the growing number of classes became urgent, Mrs. Ashmore, with the help of two members of her family in the United States, put up another building with the understanding that the whole plant should be a memorial of her mother, and called the Abigail Hart Scott Memorial.
These buildings were already outgrown, and plans are now being made for a high and normal school on East Hill - the story of the carrying out of these plans must be left to a future historian.
We have been looking at the shell of the school. Now let us look at the school itself. When the Partridges went home for their first furlough, the school was left in the care of Miss Thompson, but as she wished to do country work the school was dismissed.
Soon after, Miss Norwood opened it, and some further changes were made. The new rules required that the feet of the girls should not be bound, and that the girls should not be betrothed to heathen. If either of these conditions were violated the parents agreed to pay a fine of $30 to the school fund. All this was put in the form of a contract, and signed by the parent or guardian of the girl concerned. There was very little trouble about the matter of binding the feet, and some girls who wanted to come to school, unbound theirs, in order to make themselves eligible. But it is not always easy to keep the parents from betrothing a fine educated girl to a heathen for a large consideration. To some, we regret to say, money was of more importance than the well-being of their daughters.
When Mrs. Partridge returned to Swatow the school went back into her hands.
Since Mrs. Johnson organized the school for girls in Hongkong, the wives of missionaries have given fifty years to this one girls' school. Let us give their names - they deserve it:
Mrs. Johnson
Mrs. H. Partridge
Mrs. W. Ashmore, Jr.
Mrs. J. M. Foster
Mrs. M.E. Partridge
Dr. Scott
...
In the early days, outside of the Chinese classics there was little else except the Bible to study. As suitable textbooks were published they were introduced into the school. The course of study included everything available at that time and grew in diversity as new books were put into Chinese.
As the church advanced in its appreciation of the importance of educating girls, as well as of the responsibility of the parents for their daughters, we found it possible to inaugurate a system of fees, at first small, only one dollar a quarter, but gradually increasing, and now covering the coast of board.
In 1904 Miss Myra Weld came to the mission, the first one sent out by the Woman's Society for the work of the Girls' School. At home she had been in charge of a girls' boarding school, where girls were fitted for college. Pardon the relation of a bit of personal experience, but I can in that way better make the reader see the real Miss Weld. We had crossed the Pacific together in the same cabin. Two people got very close to one another in a cabin during such a journey. We discussed all sorts of mission problems, she from her American view point and I from my oriental one. After she got to Swatow and found out more about things, she said to me one day, "At home I had charge of a girls' college preparatory boarding school and I cmoe out here to teach the A. B. C.'s in a primary girls' school." This was a new viewpoint for me. I had not been in the habit of thinking of our school here merely as a primary school. I thought of it in terms of what it did for the girls, and of what they were after being here for a number of years. So I said to Miss Weld, "When these girls return to their own villages, there is more difference between them and their girl friends, than there is between a home college graduate and her old friends, when she returns home. These girls are so different, it is sometimes not easy for them to return to the old life and be satisfied. Comparatively, they are princesses in their own villages. When I meet them in their own homes or at the country chapels, their quiet dignified ways are a most striking contrast to the ways of untaught girls. It is not simply just how much she knows of history or geography, but what the school has done for the girl herself. I know it is only a primary school, but only we who have been struggling to make the school what it is can ever know what it cost..."
Chapter on Miscellanea:
"...When Mr. and Mrs. Partridge arrived in 1873 from Siam they had at first lived with Mr. and Mrs. Ashmore, occupying the two east rooms of the house..."
A description of the Swatow compound: "...And what a compound we have! It is such a beautiful place with the old brown rocks, the winding paths, the feathery bamboos that arch over and sway in the breezes, the scraggly old pine trees with their dark green leaves, and the banyans with their evergreen leaves and interlacing roots, which in places seem to hold a pile of lichen-covered rocks together. Miss Helen Hunt when visiting Swatow on her way to Burma said, "I had read descriptions, I had studied pictures and thought I had a good idea of the Swatow compound, but no words can describe it not pictures portray it..."
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