Background
Her father, John Luther, became the president of Baylor Female College.
Her father, John Luther, became the president of Baylor Female College.
Bagby graduated from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in 1879 and became a teacher.
Overall, Bagby worked as a missionary for sixty-one years. Crossing the country, she was baptizedin the Mississippi River when she was eleven. Bagby felt that she had a "calling to become a missionary at age 19." Some accounts, however, state that Bagby felt the calling to be a missionary by age 12.
In 1880, She and William Buck were married.
Also in 1880, Anne Bagby helped to organize the first Woman"s Missionary Union in Texas. The Bagbys started out preaching in the colony of Santa Barbara (in Brazil) which was a settlement established by ex-Confederates attempting to start a "new Southern aristocracy." Trouble in Santa Barbara convinced the Bagbys to move the mission to Salvador Bahia.
The church was formally organized in October of 1882 and consisted of five members, the missionaries themselves and a local priest, Senior Teixeira, who had been converted. Bagby and Kate Taylor wanted to create Bible classes and other programs, but waited.
When Anne Bagby found out, she insisted that she be imprisoned along with him, and was.
Eventually they were both released. Later, the mission went to Rio de Janeiro in 1891. However, the bulk of the group"s successes were in Sao Paulo City, where Anne Bagby created a flagship school for girls.
Bagby felt that starting a school would afford her a "comparable, if not superior, influence" to preaching, which was exclusive to men at the time.
The school was taken over by Bagby in 1901. By 1913, the school had 175 students.
In 1919, Bagby traveled to Houston in order to attend the annual session for the Women"s Missionary Union. Bagby"s husband died of pneumonia in 1939.
Anne Bagby died in Brazil on December 22, 1942.
Two books have been published about their lives and missionary work. The first was written by Helen Bagby, The Bagbys of Brazil (1954 Online Computer Library Center 3462810) and a second was published more recently by Daniel B. Lancaster, The Bagbys of Brazil: The Life and Work of William Buck and Anne Luther Bagby (1998 ). Kathryn Thompson Presley, reviewing Lancaster"s book for The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, called his book "refreshingly honest" and carefully detailed.