Laura Temple
American educator (1865–1949)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Annie Laura Temple (August 3, 1865 – June 23, 1949) was an American teaching missionary, based in Mexico.
Laura Temple | |
|---|---|
Laura Temple, from a 1914 newspaper | |
| Born | August 3, 1865 Jefferson County, Pennsylvania |
| Died | June 23, 1949 (aged 83) Mexico |
| Occupation | Missionary educator |
Early life
Temple was born in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Samuel Wylie Temple and Annie J. Smith Temple. She trained as a teacher at the State Normal School in Edinboro, and attended Allegheny College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1893 and a master's degree.[1] She earned a second master's degree in archaeology at the University of California.[2]
Career
Temple was a school teacher in Pennsylvania as a young woman. She went to work in Mexico under the auspices of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.[3] She was appointed principal of Hijas de Juarez school in Mexico City in 1903.[4] She was founder and director of the Sara L. Keen Methodist College in Mexico City,[5] which offered commercial and teacher-training courses.[1] She was president of the Mexican Education Society. In 1912, Temple was in the United States to attend missionary conferences in Baltimore and elsewhere.[6]
Temple was the only American missionary who did not evacuate the city in 1914, during the Mexican Revolution.[5] "If I were in the United States, I would volunteer to come here for Red Cross service. Now that I am here, why should I go away when there is an opportunity for serving?"[7] She successfully protected her school from violence and damage.[8]
In 1915, she spoke at a missionary conference in Pennsylvania,[9] and the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society meeting in San Francisco, and attended the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.[10] In 1916, she was a delegate to the Congress on Christian Work in Latin America, held in Panama.[11] After the Revolution, she founded and ran Granja, a farm school for orphaned boys, in Chapultepec.[12][13]
Temple was involved in archaeological projects in Mexico, and considered an expert on Mexican codices.[1] In 1923, in her fifties, she was part of a project led by Byron Cummings, studying ancient Navajo pueblos in Northern Arizona.[14][15]