(Joseph Samuel Morrow (1835-1939) was a missionary in Indi...)
Joseph Samuel Morrow (1835-1939) was a missionary in Indian territory, and was also known as the Grand Old Man of Masonry. This volume includes 2 stories about J. S. Murrow, “Seventy Years with the Indians ~ for Christ” and a short biographical iece from the Federal Writer’s Project. “Seventy Years with the Indians ~ for Christ” begins with “Down in Atoka, “The Place of Much Water” lives a patriarch of Oklahoma. After seeing ninety years of the struggles and trials of life, he is not fearful for the destiny of modern life, swayed by evolution, jazz and flapperism. For seventy years his life has been too busy, sheltering, feeding, educating and converting a people waging a losing fight against civilization, to worry.”
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Joseph S. Murrow was born on June 7, 1835, in Jefferson County, Georgia, United States, the son of John Murrow and Mary Amelia Badger. His paternal grandfather had been a member of Marion's band of revolutionary heroes in South Carolina, and his maternal great-grandfather is said to have held a patent to Sullivan's Island.
Young Murrow was early converted and united with the Green Fork Baptist Church, Burke County, Georgia, in 1854, was licensed to preach in 1855, and entered Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, as a sophomore in January 1856. He did not complete his studies there.
Murrow was ordained in September 1857 to go as a missionary to the Indians in the West. He was appointed by the Domestic and Indian Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention but was supported by the Rehoboth Association of Georgia. Setting out for his future field of labor at once, he arrived at old North Fork Town, Indian Territory, now Eufaula, Oklahoma, November 13, 1857.
Reverend H. F. Buckner, then the only white missionary in the Creek nation, who had been on the field since 1845, welcomed his new colleague and assisted him in many ways. They worked a good deal together among the Creeks, Seminoles, and Choctaws, Murrow riding a pony over wide areas and preaching through interpreters.
Soon he moved into the Seminole nation and established a mission there, organizing in 1861 the first church in that tribe.
When the Civil War broke out the United States government withdrew its soldiers from the various forts in the territory, leaving the Indians to the care and control of the Confederate government. Murrow was selected by the Seminole council as agent in dealings with this government, a position which he held throughout the war, acting after 1863 as subsistence commissary in providing food for the Seminole, Comanche, Osage, and Wichita refugees along the Red River. While attending to these temporal matters, he was carrying on as far as possible his missionary work. Near the end of the war he was forced to remove to Texas for the safety of his family, where, at Linden, he engaged in teaching.
On his return from Texas in 1867 he settled at Atoka in the Choctaw nation, which became the center of his operations thereafter. For some years he spent considerable time in reestablishing and reviving among the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles the mission work which had been disrupted by the war. At his call representatives of sixteen churches met at Atoka in July 1872 and organized the Choctaw and Chickasaw Baptist Association, a body which has done much for the spread of Christianity among the Indians. He was also largely instrumental in beginning mission work among the wild or blanket Indians through the native Indian preacher, John McIntosh.
In 1876 he began a movement for the organization of all the Indian associations into a general body which could promote a larger fellowship and more vigorous work. As a result the Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention was organized in 1881, of which he was president for seventeen years. The founding at Bacone of Indian University, or Bacone College, was also due to his activities.
In 1885 the American Baptist Home Mission Society appointed him superintendent of its Indian mission work and he severed his connection with the Southern Baptist Convention. Two years later, the Atoka Baptist Academy was founded; it was operated for some eighteen years and then merged into the Murrow Indian Orphans' Home, which was Murrow's last important contribution to the welfare of the Indians.
Joseph Samuel Murrow died on September 8, 1929, in Atoka, Oklahoma.
Joseph Samuel Murrow was an important missionary to the Indians of Indian Territory, who for seventy years lived among the Indians, building many churches, a college, and an orphanage, preaching the gospel and serving their interests in all possible ways. He was greatly loved by the Indians of the entire territory, being known everywhere as "Father Murrow. "
(Joseph Samuel Morrow (1835-1939) was a missionary in Indi...)
From July 1872, Joseph S. Murrow was a member of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Baptist Association.
On November 24, 1842, Joseph S. Murrow married Lucy Ann Dogan, the daughter of a Southern Baptist Preacher. On October 8, 1857, he married Nannie Elizabeth Tatom of Fulton, Mississippi.
On October 27, 1860, Joseph Murrow married Clara Burns, by whom he had a son. Then in December of 1869, Joseph Murrow again married. This time to Jane Henrietta Davidson a teacher in the Goodwater Choctaw Mission School.
After the death of his third wife in 1888, he married again to Kate Ellet, a missionary in Indian Territory, who worked with the Womans Baptist Missionary Societies. Then in 1921, he married his sixth wife, Jennie Ragle, who made him happy for rest of his life.
