Lydia Trimble: The Iowa Woman Who Built a College in China

 

Lydia Trimble in 1913. (Des Moines Register. March 9, 1913)

In 1904, Lydia Trimble was getting ready to leave Iowa. Again.

 

She’d already spent more than a decade in China, much of it working in schools for girls. Missionaries were scarce. Money was usually tight. Trouble occasionally came right to the door. Now, after roughly three years back in the United States, she was getting ready to cross the Pacific and go back to work.

 

The Sioux City Journal reported that Trimble would sail from San Francisco on August 26. Two young Chinese women who’d come to America with her were going back too. One had studied at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, another at Simpson College in Indianola. Lydia had spent part of her furlough studying at Morningside College in Sioux City.

 

But Lydia wasn’t going back to her old job. She planned on starting a college for women in China.

 

That was easy enough to say. Building one was another matter. Lydia didn’t have a pile of money or a staff waiting for her in China. A college needed land, buildings, teachers and students. Somebody had to pay for all of it.

It took years.

 

Eventually, the idea became Hwa Nan College in Foochow, now Fuzhou, one of the early colleges for women in China. Getting there involved missionaries in China, Methodist meetings back home, Morningside College, and quite a few members of the Trimble family.

 

Today, Lydia Trimble is mostly forgotten.

 

She shouldn’t be.

 

Lydia Amanda Trimble was born July 1, 1863, in Ontario, Canada, to Irish immigrant parents. The family moved around before settling in Sioux City. Her brother, John Brownlee Trimble, became a Methodist minister and was closely connected with Morningside College.

 

Lydia took a different route. In 1889, at 26, she went to China through the Des Moines Branch of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

 

It was no small trip. She had to travel west to the Pacific Coast, then spend weeks aboard a ship. There were no quick visits home if things didn’t work out. Once Lydia reached China, it became home for most of the rest of her life.

 

Her early work was around Foochow and elsewhere in Fujian Province. She eventually worked at Ngu Cheng, where Methodist missionaries operated schools for girls. One report said Lydia was the only resident missionary in an area where there should have been three.

 

There was danger too. During the late 1890s, a missionary house in Lydia’s district was attacked and fired on by a mob. Political unrest and hostility toward foreigners were part of life in some areas. Then came the Boxer upheaval around the turn of the century.

 

Lydia stayed.

 

More and more, her work centered on schools. The first problem wasn’t always teaching girls. It was getting them through the door. She said missionaries around Foochow had once paid girls 30 cents a day to get them to attend school. Families simply didn’t see much reason to educate daughters.

 

That changed. In time, Lydia faced the opposite problem. Girls wanted an education, but there weren’t enough places for them.

 

Lydia returned to the United States in 1901. By October, she was in Waterloo talking about what she’d seen.

 

The Waterloo Courier covered a Methodist missionary gathering on October 15. Lydia was one of several returned missionaries who spoke. Some of the language used by missionaries in those days is off-color now. They believed Christianity and Western education could change Chinese society, and they weren’t particularly shy about saying so.

Lydia Trimble in 1903. (Sioux City Journal. October 16, 1903)

Lydia talked about Chinese women and the limits placed on their lives. She told the audience about an educated Chinese woman she had known and what schooling had done for her.

 

There was no Hwa Nan College yet. But Lydia was already making the case for it.

 

She’d spent twelve years watching girls pass through mission schools. She’d seen families resist sending daughters to school. She’d also seen what could happen when those daughters learned to read and kept going.

 

Lydia thought they should be able to go further.

 

Her stay in America lasted roughly three years. She went to Morningside College and lived around her brother and Sioux City’s Methodist community. She also kept traveling and talking about China.

 

There was an audience for it. The Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society had deep roots in Iowa. In 1903, the Sioux City Journal reported that the organization had sent about 400 missionaries overseas. Around 40 came from Iowa.

 

Lydia was one of those 40. But by then, she had her own project in mind.

 

Something else was happening during those years. Chinese women were studying in Iowa.

 

Mabel Sia appeared at that 1901 missionary meeting in Waterloo. Other Chinese students attended Cornell and Simpson. These women had made the trip in the other direction, from China to Iowa, and ended up in college classrooms here.

 

That complicates the usual missionary story. This wasn’t just Americans going overseas to teach Chinese women. Chinese women were coming here to study too. There was movement in both directions. And Lydia was in the middle of it.

 

In 1904, she was pushing church leaders to go beyond mission schools and create a college for women. She took the idea to the Methodist General Conference in Los Angeles and argued for a college at Foochow.

 

Getting church people to like the idea was one thing. Actually doing it was another.

 

They needed teachers who could handle college work. They needed students ready for it. They needed land, dormitories and classrooms. And they needed money.

 

Money was always a problem.

 

Lydia sailed back to China in August 1904. She’d spent about three years in America going to school, speaking to church groups and trying to get people behind the idea. Now she had to do something with it.

 

Within a few months, her name turned up in a letter from China.

 

Carrie Bartlett, another Morningside graduate working as a missionary, wrote home about life at the mission. The Sioux City Journal published part of her letter in February 1905.

 

(Sioux City Journal. February 26, 1905)

Bartlett said Lydia and another missionary, Mamie Glasburner, had gone to Hai Yang for several weeks. She also said Lydia expected to start building a “girls’ school” that spring.

 

That probably wasn’t Hwa Nan itself. There were already day schools and boarding schools for girls in the region. Hwa Nan didn’t spring up on empty ground with Lydia as the first person to think Chinese girls should go to school.

 

But Lydia was building.

 

Then came a little newspaper item in 1907. It wasn’t much. The Sioux City Journal ran Lydia’s photograph and a few lines about her work in China. But one line mattered.

 

She’d been appointed “organizer of a college to be erected at Foo Chow.” It wasn’t just Lydia talking anymore. Building the school was her job.

 

The college preparatory program began in 1908. Twenty-three girls were doing preparatory work while plans for permanent buildings moved along. Lydia was named president and took a hand in getting the new school built.

Sioux City Journal. December 11, 1907)

Before long, the Trimble family was all over the project.

 

Her nephew Frederick Homer Trimble had studied architecture and civil engineering at Morningside. He went to China as an industrial missionary and later became involved in the design and construction of the college. He worked with Sioux City architect Wilford W. Beach on the plans.

 

Lydia’s niece, Lydia Ethel Wallace, worked at Hwa Nan and later became dean.

 

It was becoming something of a family operation.

 

That didn’t make construction easy. The proposed site had problems. There were graves to deal with, along with concerns about the ground under parts of the buildings. And every time they solved one problem, the old one was still hanging around.

 

Money.

 

By 1911, though, work on the permanent campus was moving. The students helped dig the foundation.

 

On March 9, 1913, the Des Moines Register ran a large illustrated story about Lydia and the college. The headline introduced readers to “Lydia A. Trimble of Galva, Iowa,” president of a women’s college in China.

 

The Register said Lydia and her brother had founded the college. That’s too simple. The school grew out of earlier missionary schools and involved a lot more people than Lydia and her brother.

 

But forget the headline for a minute. Look at the pictures. There’s Lydia. A cornerstone ceremony. And a group of young Chinese women working at the building site. Digging the foundation.

Chinese women help dig foundation of Hwa Nan College. 
(Des Moines Register. December 9, 1913)

Twelve years earlier, Lydia had been in Waterloo talking about why Chinese women should be educated. Now Chinese women were helping dig the foundation of a college where they could get that education. They weren’t standing off to the side waiting for someone to finish it. They were in the dirt, working.

 

The campus slowly took shape. Payne Hall held classrooms and administrative offices. Cranston Hall became a dormitory. Both were finished around 1914.

 

The money problems didn’t disappear. Funds ran out before Cranston Hall was finished. Lydia’s brother J. B. Trimble stepped in and mortgaged his farm to help complete it.

 

That part still needs better documentation. But there’s no question the family was deeply involved. Her brother backed the project from Iowa. Her nephew helped build it. Her niece worked there.

 

And Lydia kept pushing.

 

The bigger question was whether Chinese women actually wanted what she was building.

Chinese women help lay cornerstone of Hwa Nan College in 1913.
(Des Moines Register. March 9, 1913)

By 1920, there wasn’t much doubt.

 

Lydia was back in Sioux City that August, speaking to the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. This time she had about 30 years in China behind her.

 

She reminded the audience of the old days, when missionaries sometimes had to pay girls to attend school. That wasn’t the problem anymore.

 

Now girls wanted in.

 

Hwa Nan had about 50 students and 14 teachers. Trained women were in demand, especially as teachers. The college could produce graduates, but other schools and organizations wanted them as fast as Hwa Nan could turn them out.

 

Lydia told the audience about one girl who wanted to attend college but couldn’t afford it. Her mother worked during the day, even on Sundays, so her daughter could go to school.

 

That was a long way from paying girls 30 cents to show up.

 

China itself was changing fast. Lydia and a few American missionaries didn’t cause that change. Chinese reformers, teachers, families and students were pushing their country in new directions too.

 

Hwa Nan was one piece of something much bigger.

 

There was another interesting thing about Lydia’s 1920 appearance.  Miss Chen, a Chinese graduate of the college, was there with her. That makes a nice comparison with Waterloo in 1901. Back then Lydia stood in front of an Iowa audience and talked about Chinese women and what education might do for them.

 

Nineteen years later, one of those women stood there beside her.

 

By 1930, Lydia had spent about 40 years in China. Hwa Nan wasn’t an experiment anymore. It had buildings, graduates, and a history.

 

Then her name showed up in the Sioux City Journal because of trouble.

 

Fighting in China had put Americans in several areas at risk. The paper reported that Lydia might be among them. It reminded readers that she was one of the founders of Hwa Nan College and noted her long connection to Sioux City and Morningside.

 

Hwa Nan had changed too. Lydia eventually stepped down as president, and Chinese women took on more of the leadership. That was important. If the college was going to last, it couldn’t remain an American missionary operation forever.

 

Lydia stayed in China after leaving the presidency. She’d gone there at 26. Now she was an old woman, and China had changed around her.

 

So had education for women.

 

Lydia Trimble died in China in the early 1940s, more than half a century after she first arrived.

 

There’s an easy way to tell this story. It’s also probably the wrong way. Make Lydia a hero. Make the missionaries the good guys. Have them sail into China, build a college and give Chinese women an education.

 

It wasn’t that clean.

 

Lydia belonged to the American Protestant missionary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The missionaries wanted converts. Education was part of that work. They also carried plenty of American assumptions about China, some of which sound pretty ugly today.

 

Chinese women weren’t sitting around waiting for Americans to save them. They had their own reasons for wanting an education. Families made their own decisions. Chinese teachers and reformers were changing the country from within. As more women went to school, they began taking over the institutions that had once been run by foreigners.

 

That messier version is the better story.

 

Lydia arrived in a China where missionaries sometimes had trouble getting girls into elementary school. She lived long enough to see mothers work extra hours so their daughters could attend college. She didn’t do that alone. Not even close. But she was there for a big piece of it.

 

And Iowa was part of it too.

 

Lydia didn’t leave in 1889, disappear into China and show up decades later with a college. She came back. She talked to people in Waterloo and Sioux City. She went to Morningside. She worked church meetings. She asked for support. Then she went back to China and tried to turn all that talk into a school.

 

Morningside kept turning up. Lydia studied there. Her brother was tied to it. Carrie Bartlett went there before heading to China. Frederick Trimble studied there before helping build Hwa Nan. Chinese students came the other way and studied in Iowa.

 

For a few years, Sioux City was one of the places where a women’s college in China was being put together.

 

Which brings us back to that photograph from 1913.

 

Not Lydia’s portrait. The one with the students in the dirt.

 

The buildings weren’t finished. The money problems weren’t over. Nobody knew exactly what Hwa Nan would become. But the students were already there, helping dig the ground where their college would stand.

 

That picture gets closer to the story than the grand headlines do. Lydia had an idea, but plenty of other hands had to make it work. Some were in Iowa. Some belonged to missionaries and church officials. Some belonged to the Trimble family.

 

And some belonged to the Chinese women holding the shovels.

 

By 1920, Lydia could come back to Sioux City and say the old problem had flipped. They no longer had to pay girls to attend school. Families were trying to figure out how to get their daughters in. And standing there with Lydia was Miss Chen, a graduate of Hwa Nan.

 

Thirty years earlier, Lydia had gone to China thinking she had something to teach. In 1920, the women she’d gone there to teach were graduating from college, becoming teachers, and taking the story somewhere else.

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