Watts Orson Pye was a Congregational missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Fenzhou, Shanix, China.
Background
Watts Orson was born on October 20, 1878 on a farm near Faribault, Minnesota, United States, the son of Caleb G. and Florence (Cook) Pye. His home was a preparation both for his earnest religious purpose and for his pioneer life as a missionary. His father was the son of one of the early settlers of Minnesota, and the younger Pye himself was inured to the hard manual labor of a farm. The father, also, was a deacon in a Congregational church, and his mother, descended from one of the old Dutch families of New York which had given many of its sons to the Christian ministry, was active in the church and especially interested in missions.
Education
His education was obtained in a district school near his home, in the Central High School of Faribault (from which he graduated in June 1898), then, after a year of work on his father's farm, at Carleton College (Bachelor of arts 1903). Watts Orson Pye spent the next two years in Texas caring for an invalid sister, and during this time studied theology at the seminary of the Southern Presbyterian Church in Austin.
Entering Oberlin Theological Seminary in the autumn of 1905, he graduated in 1907. He was above the average as a student, but rather because of hard work than of native brilliance. It was during his first year in Carleton College that he decided to be a missionary, a step taken because of the influence of fellow students and members of the faculty.
Career
After studies for a year Pye taught Biblical literature in Tillotson College, a mission school for negroes. He was especially active at Carleton in creating an interest in foreign missions and in leading others to enter that calling.
Pye was ordained May 7, 1907, and in September of that year sailed for China as a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He had hoped to go to Kalgan, but instead was appointed to Fenchow, in the province of Shansi. Here the mission was still suffering from the effects of the Boxer persecution of 1900. Much of his time was first given to educational work.
He regarded as his parish an area of about 30, 000 square miles in west central Shansi and northern Shensi, where, with the exception of four points, no Protestant mission work had so far been begun. He made a thorough survey of the region, to determine its main physical features, its roads, and its towns and villages.
Through correspondence, travel, and annual conferences held near Fenchow, he directed the large staff of Chinese through whom most of the work was done. An enterprise which had grown so rapidly could not fail to have weaknesses, but Pye was cognizant of these and would probably have remedied at least part of them had it not been for his untimely death on January 9, 1926.
Achievements
Watts Orson Pye, as a famous Congregational missionary, developed one of the most noteworthy pioneer missionary enterprises in the history of China. On the basis of his survey of the Chinese region, and almost entirely through the agency of Chinese associates, he directed the introduction of Protestant Christianity in China. He was so sucessful in west central Shansi and northern Shensi, that even extended his activities north of the Great Wall.
Views
Pye dreamed of planting Christianity in each of the thousands of towns and villages of the region and of making the churches centers for improving their religious, intellectual, social, and economic environment.
Personality
Watts Orson Pye was a man of charm, of singularly radiant religious life, of complete integrity, of rare humility, with a great capacity for remembering faces and names, for leading without arousing antagonism, and for winning, inspiring, and holding friends.
Connections
On October 5, 1915, Pye was married, at Peking, to Gertrude Chaney.
