Abbie Goodrich Chapin

Abbie Goodrich Chapin was born in Tongzhou, China,[1] the daughter of Lyman Dwight Chapin and Clara Labaree Evans Chapin. Her parents were American missionaries in China; her father was an ordained minister, and her mother was a teacher.[2] Her brothers Dwight and Edward were also a missionaries in China; both were ordained Presbyterian ministers.[3]

Chapin graduated from the University of Southern California in 1892 (her older sister Louise (Lula) graduated from USC the previous year).[4][5][6]

Under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Chapin taught at the Mary Morrill School for Women in Paotingfu,[7] and at Tongzhou.[8][9] Her work was funded in part by Christian Endeavor societies.[8] In 1900, she was in Beijing,[10] and listed among "Foreigners Who Have Probably Been Slain" in a San Francisco newspaper, after she was captured in the Boxer Rebellion.[11] She and the other missionaries in her group were confirmed alive about six weeks later.[12] In 1901, she was one of four women decorated by King Edward VII with the Royal Red Cross, for services rendered at Beijing's international hospital,[13][14][15] the first American so honored.[3]

She visited her siblings in the United States and spoke to American church groups in 1905,[16] 1913,[17] 1921,[18] and in 1931[19] and 1932.[7] In 1937, she was again in peril, as one of several Americans sheltering from Japanese bombings and caring for wounded soldiers at the Presbyterian Hospital in Paotingfu.[20][21]

Chapin worked and lived for most of her life with Mary E. Andrews (also seen as Mary E. Andrus), a fellow American teaching missionary. Andrews died at Paotingfu in 1936.[22] Chapin died in Glendale, California in 1956, aged 88 years.[3]

• "Alice S. Browne Frame, Mary E. Andrus and Abbey G. Chapin, near their girls' school in Tung-chou, China" , photograph in the Viette Brown Sprague Papers, Mount Holyoke College.
• Abbie Goodrich Chapin at Find a Grave