James Matthews Hoover was an American missionary and clergyman. He served as a Methodist preacher and missionary to China.
Background
James Matthews Hoover was born on August 26, 1872 in Greenvillage, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of John and Emily Hoover. His father was the village shoemaker, and, reared in a small village, James had experience on a farm. His mother, a woman of marked intelligence and deeply religious, exerted a profound effect upon the growing boy. At fifteen he came to the "mourners' bench, " apparently with no particularly soul-shaking experience, and joined the local Methodist church.
Education
Hoover attended the village school in his boyhood and later graduated from the State Normal School at Shippensburg.
Career
Hoover taught school for about nine years, for four years as principal of schools for colored children, where he proved himself an excellent disciplinarian, and later as principal of a white boys' grammar school. At twenty-six his eye chanced to fall upon an appeal in a church paper for missionaries for India. He responded, but was appointed to Malaya. There he was assigned to teach in a school in Penang.
Hoover's great opportunity came in 1903, and with it began the outstanding work of his life. About the year 1901 a party of Chinese Methodists from the province of Fukien, attracted by the offer of Sir Charles Brooke, rajah of Sarawak, who believed that their industriousness would aid in the development of the agricultural wealth of his realm, came to Sibu. A Methodist bishop chanced to meet them on their journey and through him a missionary was sent them. The first appointee soon came to the conviction that a younger man should be employed. As a result, in 1903 Hoover was given the post.
When he arrived he found the colonists sadly discouraged by the difficulties which confronted them in their still pioneer undertaking. At the outset he found himself in charge of a small school and of a circuit, Methodist fashion, of six stations. In addition to the Malay of which he already had a smattering, he set himself to acquire Chinese. He quickly saw that he must adopt as an objective the raising of the morale and the bettering of the economic conditions of the disheartened Chinese. This he did.
In 1935, when about to retire to make way for a younger missionary, he became ill with malaria while on a trip to Singapore but returned to Borneo and died in the hospital at Kuching.
Achievements
As a Methodist local preacher in Pennsylvania, Hoover was active in the local church and Sunday school, and organized a Young Men's Christian Association. When Hoover became a missionary, he increased the number of schools in China. He introduced bicycles, encouraged the building of roads and bridges, and procured a gasoline launch to improve the river transportation; imported a rice-hulling mill with an engine to operate it, an electric-light plant, the machinery for a sawmill, and an ice-machine. He established rubber plantations and advised in matters of trade, built a community house and a hostel, multiplied schools and chapels, and supervised the teachers and the preachers.
Religion
Hoover was a member of the Methodist church.
Personality
Hoover was six feet tall, large of frame, weighed 160 pounds, and was fond of walking.
Connections
On March 15, 1904, Hoover married Ethel Mary Young, a teacher in Penang. She taught the girls housekeeping methods, nursing, and simple medical practice. The couple had no children.
