Bethlehem Home Mission Society & Women’s Auxiliary Mission Society Papers

     When I started my final year as an undergraduate student at Lehigh University, a German professor of mine directed me to the Moravian Archives, and I jumped at the opportunity to organize documents, read script, and learn about this city. So far, I’ve been putting missionary society papers in order.
Specifically, I have been organizing the papers of the Bethlehem Home Mission Society (BHMS) and the Women’s Auxiliary Mission Society (WAMS) (which later merged with the Northeastern Moravian Mission Society). The collections are similar, and more or less what one would expect: meetings, fundraisers, donations, and mission accounts. Last week I wrapped up the BHMS collection, and this week, I should finish work on the WAMS.
     The Bethlehem Home Mission Society’s papers seemed familiar—I’ve lived in Bethlehem for about three years now, and the street names I see while walking through the town are the names that appear over and over again, in not only the correspondence and board member lists, but also the work orders for the Locust Street Chapel. And then there are the Chapel Plans. The building may be seemingly old and permanent today, but here its conception and construction are heavily documented.

     The records of the Women’s Mission Society are a bit more complete, with minutes running from 1892 to 1993, and various nonconsecutive logs from 1819 through 1886. I was struck by the other accounts given by early missionaries, presented by their families or descendants. For faith, or possibly adventure, these people traveled far from home at a time when travel was hard and dangerous, and made new lives for themselves in places very unlike Bethlehem. It was strange, though, to read that a missionary was simply sent a new wife after the woman who accompanied him to his mission had died. It’s a bit weird to imagine such a thing happening in American culture today, but it was mentioned without much ado.
     But more on the Society. Particularly interesting is its celebration of Susan Elizabeth Kaske, otherwise known as the first American Foreign Missionary, and member of the congregation of the oldest Women’s Missionary Society in the USA. Her unobtrusive memorial sits upon her grave in Bethlehem, not far from where we work and study today.

                                                                                     -Olivia Sardo