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Levi Spaulding (22 August 1791 – 18 June 1873) was an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionary to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and he also led the team of American missionaries to choose Madura as a site for American Madura Mission, for Tamil people of South India.
He was an evangelist, hymnist, and published a Tamil dictionary and an English-Tamil dictionary.
Biography
Early life
He was born on 22 August 1791 in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to Elisabeth and Phinehas Spaulding. He started his career as a farmer till the death of his father in 1809. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1815 and Andover Theological Seminary in the Tabernacle Church, Salem, Massachusetts, in 1818. He along with Henry Woodward, Fisk, and Miron Winslow were ordained by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1818 and was married to Mary Christie in the same year.
Missionary work
As a missionary under ABCFM, he along with fellow-missionaries like John Scudder, the first medical missionary, sailed for Calcutta, India on 8 June 1819 from Boston and arrived Jaffna, Ceylon, on 1 December 1820. Upon his arrival at the mission station, he was initially placed at Manepay(also spelled as Manipay), where he served between 1821 and 1828; later, he served at Tellippalai (also spelled Tillipally) from 1828 and 1833.
He spent most of his missionary career at Oodooville (also spelled Uduville or Uduvil), where he supervised the church, schools, and did evangelistic work among heathens in villages. Besides his work in school at Oodooville, he was a preacher who preferred to go into the crowd and reach them in their own idiom; hence, he got to know the natives mind and heart better than other missionaries. His wife Mary Spaulding took charge of the girl's boarding school in Uduvelli for almost forty years. In January 1834, he led the group of American missionaries to explore the suitable locations for a new ABCFM mission station to the Tamil people of South India; thus, Madura, also spelled Madurai, was identified as the right site for new American Madura Mission under the guidance of Levi Spaulding. In July 1834, Henry Richard Hoisington and William Todd visited; subsequently, Hoisington returned after two months while Todd remained.
He died at an age of eighty-two on 18 June 1873 after fifty-four years of missionary service in India and Sri Lanka.