Marilla Baker was born on November 25, 1828 in Greenfield Centre, New York, United States, the daughter of Sealk and Sarah Tremain Baker.
When she was nine years old, in the chapel which the Bakers attended, Marilla heard an appeal in behalf of the Burma Mission and for the first time looked upon an idol. The event made a lasting impression upon her.
Marilla was converted during a revival in Maryland, Otsego County, New York.
In July of 1850 she accompanied her husband, Lovell Ingalls, to his foreign field and worked with him until his death, March 14, 1856, when she returned to the United States to arrange for the education of her step-daughter.
On November 26, 1858, under appointment of the American Baptist Missionary Union, she sailed again for Burma. Accordingly, when she proposed to establish a mission at Thongze, then a remote village in the jungle of Lower Burma, notwithstanding the protests of her friends and advisers she had her own way. She did not preach herself, but made a wise choice of native preachers. Twice Dacoits burned the mission premises, but when she demonstrated that she knew how to use a revolver they left her alone.
When the railroad reached Thongze, she established reading rooms and libraries for the English employees. Marilla Baker helped Queen Victoria to send a Bible with an autograph inscription to the Queen of Burma. An account of its presentation given to the students of Wellesley College by Mrs. Ingalls when on a visit to the United States was retold by Sarah F. Whitney and was published in 1909 under the title, The Story of the Queen's Bible.
She died in Thongze.
Marilla Baker Ingalls established a mission at Thongze, organized reading rooms and libraries for the English employees, and carried on temperance work among them. Here for more than forty years she gave herself to a man's work, laboring more strenuously and in more different lines than almost any American woman missionary ever had. Besides, more than a hundred of Buddhist priests became Christians under her teaching.
Marilla was a woman of vivacity, energy, self-confidence, resourcefulness, marked independence, and strong will.
She had an uncommon aversion to idols, and a large cast-iron dog set up before her residence was her favorite illustration of the truth that images, though lifelike in appearance, can neither harm nor help, and won her the sobriquet, "lady of the iron watch dog. "
Quotes from others about the person
According to Eighty-ninth Annual Report of the American Baptist Missionary Union, Baptist Missionary Magazine, "to the sick and suffering Marilla . .. (was) doctor and nurse; to the wronged and oppressed, both lawyer and judge; and to pastor and preacher, the faithful theological professor".
Marilla met at a missionary meeting in Wisconsin a widowed missionary, Rev. Lovell Ingalls and on December 23, 1850, at East Troy, they were married.
