Miron Winslow
Quick Facts
Biography
Miron Winslow (11 December 1789 - 22 October 1864) was an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionary to American Ceylon Mission, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he established a mission at Oodooville and founded a seminary. He founded a mission station at Madras, first and chief station of American Madras Mission.
He published several books, notably, A History of Missions and A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil, a Tamil to English lexicon which took twenty years of missionary labor to compile sixty-seven thousand Tamil words-This dictionary was based in part on manuscript material of the Joseph Knight (pastor), of the London Missionary Society, and the Rev. Samuel Hutchings, of the American mission, and was the most complete dictionary of a modern Indian language published at that time. The book later become the base for the more exhaustive Tamil Lexicon dictionary published by the University of Madras in 1924.
Biography
Early life
He was born in Williston, Vermont, on 11 December 1789 to Anna Kellogg and Nathaniel Winslow. At the age of fourteen, he started his career as a store clerk and than established himself in a business in Norwich, Connecticut, where he was employed for two years.
With conversion, he had a conviction that he had to preach gospel, and to preach un-evangelized nations; therefore, changed career paths, and gave himself to the service of Christ among the heathen. Later, he graduated from Middlebury College in 1815 and Andover Theological Seminary in 1818. On 19 January 1819, he married Harriet W. Lathrop, who bore him six children.
During his vacation years at Andover Theological Seminary, he worked as an agent of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions(ABCFM) to tour New England and raise funds. On 4 November 1818, he was ordained by ABCFM at Tabernacle church, Salem, Massachusetts, together with Pliny Fisk and others. He was sent as a missionary to Ceylon Mission, Ceylon.
Missionary work
On June 8, 1819, he embarked from Boston on brig Indus, bound for Calcutta, India. From Calcutta, he proceeded to Ceylon and reached his destination on December 14, 1819. As part of his missionary duty, he was initially stationed at Oodooville on July 4, 1820. At Oodooville, he established a mission and a seminary. After having laboured for fourteen years at Oodooville, he was transferred to Madras, South India. Having arrived Madras on August 18, 1836, he had chosen that as the mission site for American Madras Mission and started his missionary activities; consequently, Winslow is credited in commencing[founding] American Madras Mission in 1836. In September 1836, he was joined by John Scudder, Sr., the first American medical missionary in India.
He visited America in 1855, but returned in 1858. Due to ill-health, he left again to America in August 1864; however, he died at an age of seventy-four, on his way from India to America at the Cape of Good Hope(Cape Town), South Africa, on 22 October 1864, two days after he reached Cape Town.