Background
Mary Reed was born on December 4, 1854 in Lowell, Washington County, Ohio. She was the eldest daughter and second of the eleven children (three of whom died in infancy) of Wesley W. Reed, whose parents had come to Ohio from New Jersey and Virginia, and Sarah Ann (Henderson) Reed, of Virginia descent. Her father is listed in the 1860 census as a saddler, and the family moved about the area, residing in turn at Crooked Tree, Noble County, again at Lowell, and finally at nearby Beckett's Post Office. The great event of Mary's adolescence was religious conversion at sixteen.
Education
She graduated from the Malta (Ohio) high school and in 1878 from the Ohio State Normal School at Worthington.
Career
For five years she taught school, the last appointment being at Kenton in north central Ohio. Moved by reports on the plight of women in the zenanas of India, Miss Reed applied for service to the Cincinnati branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was sent to India in 1884.
She was assigned to zenana work at Cawnpore, but when her health broke she was sent for rest to Pithoragarh in the Himalayas near Almora in Kumaon district close to the border of Nepal. There she became acquainted with the ministry to lepers carried on by the London-based interdenominational Mission to Lepers, founded by Wellesley Cosby Bailey in 1874.
Her next assignment was that of headmistress of a girls' high school at Gonda. But again her health failed, and she went home on furlough in 1890. In Cincinnati and New York, physicians tentatively agreed with her premonition that she had leprosy, a diagnosis that was subsequently affirmed by specialists in London and Bombay. Mary Reed understood this affliction to be a special call of God to minister to the lepers whom she had met in the Himalayas.
Upon the request of the Methodist bishop in India, James Mills Thoburn, the Mission to Lepers in 1891 appointed Miss Reed as superintendent of the leper asylum at Chandag Heights near Almora; henceforth she was a staff member of both the Methodist Mission and the Mission to Lepers. Leprosy was then considered incurable, and Mary Reed's plight and example, when known, made her at once a heroine. Chandag Heights is located on a high ridge of the Himalayas above the Shor valley, five days by foot or pony over mountain paths from Almora.
There Mary Reed ministered to the lepers from 1891 to her death in 1943. Because of the public's horror of the disease, she avoided direct contact with well persons.
In 1899, at the insistence of fellow missionaries, she attended the Methodist Annual Conference at Lucknow.
An eighteen months' furlough in 1904-05 took her to Palestine, and she made a final visit home to the United States for six months in 1906. Her disease had been declared cured in 1896. This caused great controversy, some doubting whether she had ever had leprosy. It did become active again in 1932-33, but by that time the disease could be arrested and even cured, and injections checked it.
At Chandag, Miss Reed kept in touch with other missionaries in the region. Until too aged, she did some traveling in the leper work, being allowed to cross the Nepal border at will; and in 1905 she relieved Dr. Albert Leroy Shelton at Bhot on the Tibet border while he was absent. Numerous visitors found their way to Chandag. Miss Reed kept in touch with the outside world by reading newspapers, magazines, and books; the walls of her "Sunny Crest Cottage" were covered with clippings about persons and events.
With advancing age she grew enfeebled and increasingly blind, and in 1938 the burden of administration was taken over by Miss Kate Ogilvie. During the last days of 1942 Miss Reed fell on her cottage steps and was severely injured. She died the following April, and was buried on the mountain slope before the chapel.
Personality
She wore long gloves, ate alone while her guests lodged and dined in a separate bungalow, and during this period of more than fifty years came down from her mountain retreat only three times.
