Item #18906 From Pillow to Throne. Miss Lizzie L. Johnson, Invalid Missionary Worker. 'Go Work in My Vineyard.' By Charles W. Jacobs. Lizze L. Johnson, Charles W. Jacobs.

From Pillow to Throne. Miss Lizzie L. Johnson, Invalid Missionary Worker. 'Go Work in My Vineyard.' By Charles W. Jacobs.

[Casey, Illinois? n. p.], (1910). First edition. 8vo, original blue cloth, red lettering, [92] unnumbered pages. 10 inserted plates. A few splashes of ink to the lower board, some bits of old adhesive or rubber clinging to the bottom half of the lower joint; a little general light soiling; a very good copy. Item #18906

An account of the life of a woman usually considered something of a Methodist saint, Lizzie Louvira Johnson (1869-1909), confined to bed in the family home in Casey, Illinois since age 13 with an unspecified spinal complaint and evidently unable to even lift her head from her bed. After a conversion experience in 1890, she turned to raising money for foreign missionaries, first with a hand-sewn crazy quilt (which eventually become something of a traveling exhibition to raise funds) and then with making silk bookmarks which she sold for prices ranging from ten cents to a quarter--and with the profits, she raised over $25,000 for the cause of missions. This posthumous memoir is taken largely from her journals, which she kept up through about 1900; the account in supplemented by letters of thanks and other correspondence from foreign missionaries, as well as one from Booker T. Washington from Tuskegee, noting "It may interest you to know that we gave the remembrances to the foreigners who are attending our school here from Jamaica, Cuba, Porto Rico, Hayti, San Domingo, South Africa and the Bahams." See Jack L. Newsome. "Lizzie, the Missionary Worker." Methodist History (35:3), April 1997. pp. 169-175.

Price: $150.00

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