Discovered - Lost Photographs of The Rev. William A. Wilson



by Glenn N. Holliman

October 29, 2013 I visited my sister, Rebecca Louise Holliman Payne in Tennessee who was in the process of sorting her family pictures.  One box she had stored in her attic years ago was an inheritance of memorabilia from our late Aunt Louise Stansbery Sherwood (1915-2006).  Louise was the daughter of Mayme T. Osborne (1896-1953) and Charles S. Stansbery (1893-1957). Below Mayme and Louise in 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where the family had moved during World War II.

Louise's maternal grandparents were G.W. Osborne (1844-1927) and Frances Wilson Osborne (1851-1940), both originally from Ashe County, North Carolina.  They had met in 1865 when G.W. and a cousin, Richard Franklin Osborne, took refuge in the home of Caroline Greer Wilson (1828-1911), the recent widow of Isaac Wilson (1822-1864) ambushed on his farm during the Civil War.

In the attic box were photos from the Stansberys and three intriguing ones of Louise's great uncle and a brother of Frances Wilson Osborne, The Rev. William A. Wilson (1861-1950).  The pictures are in excellent condition and may have been professionally made.  They were taken in Japan where Will served as a Southern Methodist missionary from 1890 to 1930.

I emailed these photos to Michael Ignelzi, a direct descendant of William Wilson, but he had not seem them in the family.  So I am sharing them now with the larger family, asking if others have copies of these picture or know when they were taken of our fascinating  ancestor who moved in his life from the lush, but isolated mountains of western North Carolina, to a Japan awakening from centuries of  self-imposed isolation from the West. 

 

Educated at the University of North Carolina, Class of 1889 at Chapel Hill, Will was ordained a Southern Methodist Church pastor at his own Sutherland Methodist Church in Ashe County.  (My own great grandfather, G. W. Washington, was ordained a lay pastor in the same denomination in the 1870s in the same church.)  It is from Will's memoirs that we know so much of Isaac and Caroline Greer Wilson and the travail of the Civil War in the family.

I would like to think in the picture below, evidently taken in Will's home, that one can see the likeness of his mother, Caroline Greer Wilson, in the middle photograph on the shelf above Will's head.  Unfortunately who the women are with Will are not identified, but one assumes they are connected to his church or school work in Japan.

 

The above picture is labeled in English as having been processed by K. Mimura in Okayama, Japan.  These pictures may have been taken as publicity for the Southern Methodist Church and its missionary work in Asia.  My belief is my great grandmother, Frankie Wilson Osborne, obtained them from her brother to share with her Anderson Street Methodist Church missionary society in Bristol, Tennessee in the 1920s.

 

When World War II began, Okayama housed a Japanese Army camp. On June 29, 1945, the city was attacked with fire bombs. Almost all the city was burned, and more than 1700 people were killed. Okayama suffered terrible damage in the war, losing more than 12,000 households.  In near by Hiroshima, another site of Will's work, the U.S. Army Air Corp also dropped the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 killing over 80,000 immediately.   Below the ruins of Okayama and Will's work after the incendiary raid. (Wikipedia)

 

 

At that time in 1945, Will Wilson had been in retirement in his Durham, North Carolina home for almost 15 years.  Whatever must have been his emotions that horrid summer during the War when his life's work and many of his Japanese friends were destroyed?  One can scarce imagine his conflicted feelings.

 

  

For more information or to ask for an invitation, please contact Glenn N. Holliman at glennhistory@gmail.com.  Likewise at the Holliman-Long Ancestry.com site.  Or visit www.bholliman.com, a virtual archive.