Carter, Cameron Arthur (1894–1987) and Mabel Irene (Bowen) (1897–1978)

American missionary and church worker for thirty-seven years, from 1922–1963, Cameron Arthur Carter (柯德邇) was president of the South China Union College and Taiwan Theological Training Institute. After retiring as a China missionary in 1959, Carter became a pastor in the United States, where he remained until his retirement in 1963.

Early Life, Education, and Marriage

Cameron Arthur Carter was born to Rosannah “Rosa” Cameron Carter and Miscal Arthur Carter in Warsaw, Virginia, on May 17, 1894. Miscal had been a soldier for the Confederacy and after the Civil War became a lumberman, a postmaster, and owned Carter’s Wharf on the Rappahannock River where it passed through Richmond County, Virginia.¹ He was also a polygamist, maintaining three families simultaneously. Cameron had a single sibling, a sister, with his biological parents Rosa and Arthur, but an additional five half-siblings from two other mothers.²

At the age of two, Cameron’s biological mother passed away, possibly from breast cancer or the sickness brought on due to treatment of a misdiagnosis and a breast removal.³ At some point soon after Rose’s passing–by 1900 at the latest–Cameron left his father’s house and was fostered by a Nash family. The Nash family were half cousins to Cameron. It is not clear why Cameron lived with his cousins rather than his father and Mary, his father’s other wife of nearly fifty years. Of the six Miscal Arthur Carter children, Cameron was the youngest.

At some point between 1900 and 1903, Cameron did move into his father and Mary’s home, but in 1903 Cameron suffered further tragedy. His father passed away in February, and in July his father’s wife Mary, Cameron’s de facto step-mother by 1903, also passed away. Having been passed through three different families by the age of nine, Cameron Carter was orphaned and fostered. The third woman with whom Miscal sired children, Bettie Anne Balderson, may have already passed away as well, but in the 1910 census–when Cameron was fourteen–he was living with a Balderson family, presumably relatives of Bettie Anne’s.

Although Cameron was only nine when his father passed away, and though his father never attended church, Carter credits his father with teaching him to revere God. In 1920 he wrote,

My father made no profession of Christianity; and because he saw the corruption in the popular churches, and church members using their religion as a cloak for wrong-doing, he never attended church himself, nor did he send me. But in his unselfish service for his fellow men, he set a noble example, which inspired within me a resolution to make my life an honor to God and a blessing to humankind. From earliest childhood he taught me to pray and to reverence God; and he laid special stress upon veracity as a groundwork of morality. His great love and untiring efforts for me did much to make up what I had lost through the death of my mother.⁴

Cameron’s later recollections may be questioned, however. Although his father may have made the regular circuit to visit Cameron, the young boy may have lived in the same household with his father for as little as two years of his life, and not more than five or six years, some of which would have been too early for Cameron to remember. Cameron and his sister were living with their half-cousins by 1900, and not with his father and his other wife. That wife, Mary, might have served as a mother to a two-year-old Cameron, but seemingly did not, at least not in adult Cameron’s memories. Cameron later wrote, “a mother's love--I have never known. My mother died when I was only three years old, thus leaving a vacancy in my life that has ever grown as I have heard others testify what a mother's tender affection and untiring efforts in their behalf have meant to them.⁵

What little evidence exists of the family’s religious affiliation suggests there was a leaning toward Baptist, in whose church cemeteries some of the family were lain to rest. Not much is known of Cameron’s youth, but he did attend public school from grade one to eight, and following in his father’s footsteps he began working the river; he found work as a waterman, ferrying people or goods on the Rappahannock.⁶ When this began or for how long he worked on the river is unknown, but in 1915, when he was twenty-one, Cameron was still living on the family land near Warsaw, Virginia, in the Chesapeake area, in what had been part of the British colonies from the early 1600s.

Although Cameron gives credit to his father for his Christlike example, it was his sister, Miscal Aura Carter, who first heard the Seventh-day Adventist message in 1910. Aura had a “special burden” for her younger brother and “as a result of her many requests to the president of the [Potomac] Conference,” in 1914 a Washington Missionary College theology student came to give meetings in Aura’s home. That student, W.A. Nelson, returned in 1915 to give six weeks of meetings, and it was in this series that Cameron also accepted the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) message. That winter Cameron left for Takoma Park to attend Washington Missionary College (WMC).⁷ But Cameron had only an eighth-grade education and would need to complete secondary school before starting on a degree.

Within weeks of arriving at WMC in late 1915 Cameron began earning money as a colporteur, presumably to pay his school fees, which was a commonly held job for Adventist students in the 1920s. And he excelled at selling books. One column in the Columbia Union Visitor reported that in the winter of 1916 Carter “proved that the city of Washington is a very fertile field for student labor with Bible Readings. Working Fridays during the school year, he sold and delivered $233 worth of books and has $35 worth still to be delivered.”⁸ In 1920 Carter wrote that just prior to his arrival in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, a raid on whiskey stills had taken place. The locals “soon settled it among themselves that we [four colporteurs] were officers of the law.”⁹ Soon, however, they gained the trust of the locals and found “honest hearts” with whom they planted seed which, they hoped, “may do more to abolish stills than the ‘sheriffs.’”¹⁰

Carter seems to have won over both the mountain moonshiners and his own schoolmates back on campus; he was class president in 1919 and yearbook editor and leader of the ministerial band in 1921.¹¹ He was also elected as WMC Student Association President in 1921.¹² Carter spent several years at WMC, weathering the Spanish Flu pandemic during his last three years on campus and completed a Junior Theological Course in 1921, roughly equivalent to an associate degree in modern terms.

It was at WMC that Carter met nursing student, Mabel Irene Bowen, and by mid-May 1920 they were engaged to be married.¹³ Mabel’s sister was married to W.A. Nelson, the theology student who introduced Cameron to the Adventist message.¹⁴ Shortly after becoming engaged, Mabel and Cameron applied to go to the mission field, but due to a medical procedure Mabel needed, the assignment was postponed, and during this postponement Cameron completed further education.¹⁵ In August 1921, shortly after Mabel finished her nursing training, she and Cameron married and left for a ten-day honeymoon at Colonial Beach, just a couple of hours south of the college.¹⁶ The honeymooners were joined by another newlywed couple–Mabel’s sister and her groom. Theirs was a double wedding. They wed together and honeymooned together. For the next academic year, the Carters remained at WMC while Cameron completed his bachelor’s degree. Although the Sligonian yearbook does not indicate what Carter was studying at WMC for this degree, his missionary personal file does record that he was working as a student-teacher during the 1921-1922 academic year, and therefore he was probably studying education. He may also have had minors in either history and psychology, or both.¹⁷ As soon as Carter graduated with his bachelor’s degree, the couple were bound for China. On August 24, 1922, they sailed on the SS Nile from San Francisco to Shanghai.¹⁸

Career

On arriving in China, Mabel and Cameron both began language study and spent the first two years at Nanking University and then spent their summers teaching at Shanghai Missionary College on Ningkuo Rd (today, Ningguo Rd), where they would be assigned once they finished language study.¹⁹ Cameron was assigned roles as a professor in the Normal Department and as the college librarian and registrar.²⁰

The Carters were only on the Shanghai campus for a year, however, before the college relocated to the new campus.²¹ The new campus at Chiao Dou Tsen (today, Qiao Tou Zhen, 桥头镇) was located about thirty miles east of Nanjing and, since it was no longer in Shanghai, it also adopted a new name–China Missionary Junior College. Although the new campus was not yet fully outfitted for students, classes began on September 28, 1925. Cameron Carter seems to have maintained roughly the same assignments on the new campus as he held on the old campus, but with the notable addition as an instructor of “child study,” with the China Branch of the Fireside Correspondence School.²²

By fall semester 1926, the school had just completed all of its buildings, and student industries had built much of the campus furnishings for the main building, two dormitories, an industrial building, and the homes for the faculty and staff.²³ “The class rooms,” one article reported, “are all furnished, complete with our own make of school furniture. No student will have to sleep on the floor or eat from the window sills this year. The electric lights will make study a pleasure from the first day. The water supply should be completed by September one.”²⁴ It was a 750 mu (123 acre) campus in the Hill District; so, there would have been plenty of room for the college's industry and farm programs. The mission work was a twelve-month job.²⁵ In 1926 Carter held a summer school for teachers and counted 106 teachers in attendance, primarily for the elementary grades.²⁶ In the 1926 school year, there were about one hundred fifty students.²⁷ This was a center for Chinese church workers-in-training.

But it would be a short tenure for Carter and some of the other faculty at the China Junior Training College. Much of China had been governed by warlords since the revolution ended in 1912, and China’s President Chiang Kai-shek had launched an effort to bring these warlords in the north under his control and to purge communism from China; the goal was to reunify China under a single government. This was called the Northern Expedition, and the Nanjing Incident in March 23, 1927, was in the context of that effort. In this incident American interests in Nanjing were attacked, and American warships on the Yangtze River came under fire. Some local residents manifested anti-foreign sentiment and were out for foreign blood, stating “we don’t want money, we want to kill.”²⁸ Within weeks the Carters had left China. Whether they fled due to this unrest or whether they were simply due a furlough after five years in the field is not certain. What is certain is that their home was raided and destroyed, and the college campus was temporarily closed.²⁹

The first stop in the exit from China was Shanghai, where on March 25 Mabel gave birth to their first child, only two days after the Nanjing unrest began. The Nanjing Incident was not isolated, and anti-foreign sentiment was widespread and endorsed by President Chiang and his military, so the Carter family, and all other foreigners in the region, had reason to fear for their safety. On March 26 order was restored in Nanjing, but most of the foreign population in the Nanjing region had been evacuated, although a few, including the vice-president of Nanking University, missionary Dr. John E. Williams, had been murdered. Dr. Williams was a Presbyterian, his murder in cold blood on the campus of the university shook China missionaries of all faiths. The Carters left Shanghai in May or June and sailed from Manila to Canada on July 9.³⁰

Once back home on furlough that autumn, Cameron immediately enrolled at Maryland University and completed a M. A. degree–a Masters of Arts–by the end of the 1927--1928 academic year, finishing just in time to return to China.³¹ After returning to China in August 1928, the Carters were assigned a new mission; Mabel and Cameron would spend the first several months at the Adventist mission compound in Kiukiang, Kangsi Province (today, Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province), overlooking the Yangtze River.³² Newly minted with a graduate degree–and evidence suggests this was in education–Cameron was assigned the post of Educational and Missionary Volunteers (MV) secretary at the mission.³³ In this role he was required to travel throughout the Central China mission provinces of Hunan, Henan, Hebei, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu Provinces and would have been responsible for understanding the state of the educational system within his territory, opening new schools, ensuring schools were properly staffed, and the various other duties a typical school district superintendent undertakes. The exception was that Carter was doing his job in the shadow of armed conflict. Carter’s first trip through parts of his territory shortly after his return from furlough in 1928 lasted about six weeks, during which time he spent “reorganizing and reestablishing the work of these departments” due to the recent political unrest.³⁴ In the summer of 1928, on a second long visit to some of the schools in his territory, Carter wrote, “In our educational and young people's work in Central China there is great need of development. During the last few years of turmoil, our school work has become more or less disorganized. In some of the churches we visited, we did not find a single young person of school age. In Kansu and Shensi provinces, we do not have a school or any work started for the young people. In this province--Kiangsi—we have four schools carrying grades one to four and one carrying grades one to six. In Hunan, where our work has been established for years, we have a middle school--a very nice building and grounds —with about five outschools. There are about eighty students altogether in the province.³⁵

In all accounts of his trips throughout the Central China Mission provinces, Carter, or those writing about Carter’s travels, are in the context of war, banditry, unrest, flood, famine, and general ineffective governance. In what seems to have been at least an annual exploration into Central China Mission territory, Carter made what was perhaps his third major trip–this time into Shaanxi province–in the autumn of 1930. Shaanxi had suffered from both famine and war for the previous three years. Carter writes of traveling through an area that had just been the site of a battle “the day or two before,” in which the government had killed “several hundred bandits.”³⁶ Carter and his traveling companion, T. A. Shaw, had been advised not to travel into Shaanxi, but winter was coming, and it would be a difficult or impossible trip to make in winter. So they decided they would pray about the trip and “to proceed as far as He should open the way for us.”³⁷ Carter wrote home to his wife describing his trip.

Reading his letter back at home in Jiangxi Province, Mabel fretted. “All I could do was to cry,” she wrote, “I was in agony as I tried to sleep. I was so worried that I would never see him again. It seemed to me I had reached the limit of endurance. Then this text came as though spoken, and yet, I did not hear a voice, ‘Go, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.' What a calm and comfort it brought! and with it, I sleep…."³⁸ Mabel was not agonizing without reason; these were the “troublous” years and “not a few [Christians] suffered martyrdom,” but in 1930 the military and political situation seemed stable in Central China, if tentative, and church membership was reported to be on an upward trend. An article in The China Division Reporter attributed this trend, in part, to Carter’s work, writing, “Brother Carter has worked hard to bring up the standard of our schools and has taken a keen interest in our young people. We have 25 church schools and here schools with grades 1-9, the total enrollment is 567, of whom 376 are children of men and women of our own faith.”³⁹

As part of the effort to strengthen the work in the Central China Mission, areas with little or no Adventist presence, became target areas. Gansu Province had no Adventists or schools. The same was true for the estimated one to two million residents of “the Wuhan Cities,” where there was only a single Adventist chapel, a plan to build a stronger presence in Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang (today, the city of Wuhan) was put into action.⁴⁰ Integral to that plan was an educational effort, and in September 1931 Carter took charge of the Hankow Junior Middle School (also sometimes referred to as the Hupeh Middle School).

The Hankow Junior Middle School was located in the village of Wang Gia Dun (Wangjia Dun, 王家墩), about two miles upriver from Hankou.⁴¹ The campus was either on the Yangtze River or very close to the river, across from Tianxingzhou Island. Initially a Li Hwai Ren was principal and Pastor Carter was the business manager, but within two years Mr. Li was no longer listed as part of the management, and Carter was the principal.⁴² Of the three cities that made up Wuhan, Hankou was where the foreign concessions were located and where most foreigners had traditionally resided.⁴³ That was true in 1913 when Adventists began the mission in Hankou. One of those early missionaries, R. F. Cottrell, wrote that, “In the country at Wang Gia Dun, two miles from Hankow, the mission owns about an acre of land, on which two mission homes were erected in 1913. School dormitories of sufficient size to accommodate sixty students have also been built.”⁴⁴

Although the physical plant had grown in the intervening nineteen years since Cottrell described it, when the Carters arrived in September 1932, the campus was completely destroyed after having been underwater for nearly a full year. Missionary C. H. Davis reported that, “The property of our mission school at Wang Gia Dun was destroyed. All the school buildings, except the chapel, fell, and as a result were almost a total loss. We had no method of carrying on our school work in Hupeh this year, so we sent some of our students to Chiao Tou Tseng and some to Hunan.⁴⁵

The flood Davis referred to was the Yangzi-Huai Flood after rivers of the same name, but the Yellow River and Grand Canal also had major flooding, while the Pearl, in Guangzhou, saw flooding but was less severe. The floods affected 52 million people and is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of anywhere from five hundred thousand to four million, approximately one hundred-fifty thousand of whom are believed to have drowned, while the rest starved to death or died from disease–cholera and typhus–or lack of protection from the weather, because the food had been washed away from housing and protection from the elements.⁴⁶ The flooded area was the size of England and half of Scotland–30,000 square miles. Thousands of people were forced to live on embankments or at the top of tall buildings for months, until the water subsided or until they died of starvation.⁴⁷ The streets became canals, and boats were fashioned from whatever could be found, including wooden coffins whose human remains had been emptied.⁴⁸

Hankou had flooded in the last week of July 1931, and by February 1932 the campus was fourteen feet underwater. “The boys' and girls' dormitories of the Hupeh Intermediate School, the factory, kitchen, and dining hall, the gate house, and two other buildings also fell and are completely destroyed. The chapel was still standing, although damaged beyond repair. The walls were full of large holes, and all the partitions were washed away. Three of the five foreign homes of our workers were completely wrecked.”⁴⁹ Water had totally covered the campus for nearly a year, from when the floods began in July of 1931 until the summer of 1932.⁵⁰ When the Carters arrived, the waters had receded at least enough to occupy the campus, but the facilities were a total loss. The Carters were starting from ground zero, and Cameron wrote, “When Mrs. Carter and I moved into the one home that had repairs far enough along to enable occupancy, the scene of desolation and destruction that we beheld, not only in what was our compound, but for miles around, might well be compared with the view that Nehemiah beheld as he returned to rebuild Jerusalem or as we may see or hear about in many centers of our work after this terrible war has swept over the land.”⁵¹ Carter arrived in September 1932 and was charged with rebuilding the school.

By 1933 students were enrolled and parts of the campus were rebuilt. The China Division Reporter noted that “Brother and Sister Carter have thrown their energies into rebuilding this school,” and using student labor, “A substantial building was erected for factory and dining-room use, and a smaller building providing homes for our teachers. A successful broom factory is being operated. The girls have done well at needlework and in the making of candy.”⁵² Students also tended a garden and sold produce at the local market.⁵³ The Adventist Church’s global Statistical Report for the Hankou school reports fifty-six students and eight teachers in 1933, with a capacity for 150 students.⁵⁴ The Carters were the only foreign missionaries at the school; the other faculty and staff were Chinese.⁵⁵ The rebuilding efforts in the twelve to eighteen months after the Carters arrived had been largely successful.

In the next school year, the Hankow school “enjoyed a good year,” and by the close of the 1935--1936 academic year, the school–now known as the Hankow Bible and Industrial Institute– enrolled 60 elementary students and 20 students in grades nine to twelve. There were five teachers, and the Carters were still the only foreign teachers.⁵⁶ Cameron and Mabel were due furlough, and by June or July 1936, they were home in Virginia. Cameron planned to travel to educational institutions throughout the southeastern United States so he could “make a study of industrial education” there and improve the industries in Hankou, or wherever he may be posted next.⁵⁷ In August 1937 Carter also attended the Missionary Volunteer and Education Conference at Black Mountain College, just outside Asheville, North Carolina.⁵⁸ Furlough was not a time away from work, rather it was a time to visit family and treat any medical issues that had not been treatable in the mission field, but there was always work and further education waiting during furlough.

Whether the Carters originally planned to stay in the United States for one year or two is not known, but by mid-1937 it was clear that returning to Hankou would not be possible; Japan had invaded Beijing in July of that year, then Shanghai in August, Nanjing in December, and were pushing westward, finally reaching, and attacking, Wuhan in June 1938. The invasion of Wuhan would have taken place sooner, but the Chinese government had opened the dikes to the Yellow River near Zhengzhou, flooding the region in an effort to delay the Japanese advance, and in doing so had displaced millions of Chinese, flooding their villages. This resulted in the deaths of perhaps half a million. The flooding did pause Japan’s advance, but only momentarily, and in October 1938 the Japanese had occupied Wuhan.⁵⁹

Thus unable to return to China, Pastor Carter spend the year in Maryland where he taught English and Bible at Takoma Adventist Academy during the 1937--1938 academic year.⁶⁰ Still, the Carters were anxious to return to China, and his tenure as a high school English and Bible teacher would last only that year, and a one year contract may have been agreed upon from the outset. Finally, in June 1938 Mabel and Cameron submitted updated personnel files to the General Conference in Maryland, and on August 6 sailed for Hong Kong on The Empress of Russia, landing on August 25.⁶¹ But Hong Kong was as far as the Carters would go. Hankou was under assault when the Carters arrived in Hong Kong, and the Carter’s home was destroyed by the Japanese during the Battle of Wuhan.⁶² The Hankow Bible and Industrial Institute, “where it is impossible this year to continue,” would evacuate its newly rebuilt campus and temporarily relocate to the Adventist mission compound in Hong Kong.⁶³

With travel to and mission work in Hankou no longer possible for Americans, the Carters planned to locate further south, and west, in the city of Changsha where Cameron would open and head a union training institute but, by the time he and Mabel arrived in Hong Kong in August 1938, that plan, too, had been shelved.⁶⁴ The Carters were not the only missionaries who could not return to their missions. In addition to Carter’s school in Hankou, two other schools and missions in Japanese occupied China were also overrun; the Chinese Training Institute (CTI) near Nanking was forced to evacuate the Qiao Tou Zhen campus and flee to Hong Kong. Once in Hong Kong CTI joined with the also-evacuated Canton Training Institute (just north of Hong Kong, in today’s Guangzhou) and opened a joint school in Shatin, at the mission compound in north Hong Kong, while the new campus in Clearwater Bay, in rural eastern Hong Kong’s New Territories, was being constructed. The Shatin campus was administratively divided into two institutions but still operated under a single head. One of the institutions became the South China Training Institute and offered grades 1 to 10. The core of this lower division school represented the Canton Training Institute. The other administrative division was the China Training Institute (CTI), which offered grades 11 to 14.⁶⁵ The head of the combined institutes was Mr. Paul Quimby, who had also been head of CTI before they evacuated east China. Once the Carters arrived, Cameron took charge of the Normal Department, and by the fall semester of 1939, the combined schools had moved to the new college campus in Clearwater Bay.⁶⁶

Despite moving to the new location, construction of the Clearwater Bay campus was not yet complete. Still it provided more space than the Shatin location. With the move to the new campus, Quimby returned to the United States, and Cameron Carter became president of the combined institution and also took on the role of chief editor of the Signs Publishing Company.⁶⁷ The new campus enjoyed stunning views over the Pacific Ocean and was far away from the crowds of urban Hong Kong. “Not only is it a beautiful place,” wrote Carter, “but it is well suited to the type of work we are endeavoring to do.” The dorm was not yet finished, and the enrollment was small, with about two hundred, half of whom are students that could not return to China in the summer due to the war.⁶⁸

The college settled into the growing shadow of the westward Japanese advances, and on May 8, 1941, understanding the coming danger, Mrs. Carter, daughter Lenora Mae, and other missionary wives and their children sailed for the United States on “special leave” while the husbands remained.⁶⁹ The situation in Hong Kong remained calm for several more months, until December 8, 1941, when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. Back across the international date line the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor only a few hours before. By December 26 Hong Kong had surrendered to Japan, and around the same time Customs Pass Road, the winding mountainous 11- mile road out to the rural college had been cut off. Students were put on half rations and relied on produce grown in the college garden. The students and staff took turns as night watchmen, and the college farmed out about forty female students to local villagers, students who the Japanese soldiers “time and again” had come looking for on the college campus.⁷⁰

The soldiers never found the girls, but in early 1942 the internment of foreigners began, and three Adventist missionaries from the South China Training Institute in Clearwater Bay, including Carter, were interned, as well as seven others from other places in Chinese territory. Three of these were women. Carter was captured by the Japanese and interned in Hong Kong’s Stanley internment camp. While there Carter lost twenty pounds, and when he was captured, he was recovering from malaria. Once inside the prison, he then suffered from beriberi. Once the missionaries were interned, the Japanese moved onto the mission compound and, when the war was over and Adventists re-took their campus, it was observed that the buildings were "riddled with shrapnel and overrun by looters,” and the Carter home had been destroyed. Unlike the treatment of the Chinese, who were “shot in cold blood,” the real privations for the Americans were “lack of food and proper living quarters far from hygienic facilities.”⁷¹ But relative to many other Japanese prisoners of war, the internment for the American missionaries at Stanley was short. In August 1942 Carter and several others were repatriated by the SS Gripsholm.⁷² Soon after return from Hong Kong, Carter and five other repatriated Adventist missionaries went to the Silver Springs, Maryland draft board office and registered for selective service.⁷³

Carter was never drafted into service, though, and in 1943 he accepted a position at Richmond Academy in Virginia, teaching Bible and English, where he taught until the end of the war.⁷⁴ Why he left Richmond after the war and moved back to the family farm in Virginia, instead of immediately returning to China, is not known. For the next three years Cameron and Mabel worked as self-supporting missionaries in Cameron’s hometown; yet, it was clear that by late 1946 the Carters were looking for a way back to China; they placed an advertisement in their local union’s Adventist publication, the Columbia Union Visitor, asking for workers to come live on the farm and take care of the land while he and Mabel returned to the mission field.⁷⁵

In May 1948 he and Mabel finally sailed for China.⁷⁶ Carter would again be an education secretary, but this time he and Mabel were in the South China Union Mission, in Hong Kong.⁷⁷ The South China Union Mission included the provinces of Guanxi, Guangdong, Fujian, the islands of Hainan, and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. But by mid-1949 it was clear that the civil war in China was not going well for Chiang Kai-shek and his government. Mao and the Communists were advancing west rapidly after the spring of 1949, and the China Division Reporter noted that many “foreign mission staff is being compelled to leave China because of the political situation.”⁷⁸ Carter was among those, and on July 29, 1949, he was approved for permanent return.⁷⁹ Cameron left China on August 3, 1949, by boat.⁸⁰ Mabel and daughter Lenora Mae left by plane, also on August 3.⁸¹ The Carters may have felt they were leaving China for the last time.

For the next three years in the United States the Carters again worked as self-supporting missionaries near the Carter family farm in Virginia.⁸² Little is known of their work in Virginia from 1949 to 1952, but it was clear that once again they sought a return to China. The South China Union Mission was renamed the South China Island Union Mission in 1949, but the islands that made up that mission were not primarily Mandarin-speaking populations, and this would have been a less comfortable environment than on mainland China. As a British colony in Canton, Hong Kong’ers spoke primarily Cantonese and English, Macau residents spoke Portuguese (the colonial mother tongue) and Cantonese. And as a Japanese colony, Formosans spoke Japanese, coastal Chinese dialects, and native Taiwanese languages. Yet, as a result of the Chinese civil war, ending in 1949, a wave of Chinese immigrated to these islands and, particularly in Taiwan, the Mandarin language began to take root.

Yet, in 1949 the civil war in China was not over; Mao and the Communists had vowed to invade Taiwan, and Chiang was committed to retaking the mainland. Additionally, many areas of west and south China were not yet under Communist control, and so it was not at all clear that Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan would be safe from armed conflict. And this was in the midst of the Korean War and the Cold War. Whether the Carters sought a position specifically in Taiwan or whether they were offered a call there is not known. But in September 1951 Cameron was approved to become head of a new theological training institute in Hsin Tien (Xindian), south of Taipei, and in June 1952 the Carters sailed for Taiwan.⁸³

The new training institute was not yet operational when the Carters arrived, and the 1952--1953 school year marked the first year for the new Taiwan Theological Training Institute (TTTI). Cameron Carter was president, and he was also the Educational and Missionary Volunteers secretary for the South China Island Union Mission. When he arrived there were no Adventist schools in Formosa, only about three hundred Adventists on the entire island, and school programs on the island were highly regulated by the government, including a required six-day school week. The situation was bleak.⁸⁴ Against the odds Carter began the school, training both Taiwanese indigenous-speaking and Chinese-speaking students to minister to the local populations.⁸⁵

Over the next seven years Carter oversaw the growth of the training institute. Initially the school offered what equated to a high school level program for future church workers. After Carter’s first year the institute began offering one year of post-secondary coursework, and in 1954, in, or after, the second year in operation, the institute offered two years of post-secondary coursework. The college was also renamed Taiwan Training Institute, no longer focusing only on theology. Carter had envisioned a nurses training program on the campus, and although the institute never operated a nurses training center on its campus in Xindian, a nurses training program was opened in 1955 in Taipei. This was the Liao Yang Hospital (療養醫院).⁸⁶ No enrollment statistics were found for the Taiwan Training Institute, but if the success of that institute is measured by the increase of church membership, then the rate of increase in church membership would help that measurement; when the Carters arrived in Taiwan in 1952 there were approximately four hundred fifty Adventists in Taiwan.⁸⁷ When they left Taiwan in 1959, there were a reported 2,414 Adventists in Taiwan.⁸⁸

Finally, on September 10, 1959, after thirty-seven years of service, Cameron Carter’s permanent return was approved, at his request.⁸⁹ In their thirty-seven years in the mission field, nearly all of the publicly available records are either from or about Cameron. Very little points to the details of Mabel’s daily or weekly role in the mission field. Even the biographical information forms that she and Cameron completed are of limited help. Cameron submitted four of these forms (1920, 1938, 1942, 1952), and with each was listed an extensive description of his educational background and mission employment, as was standard with both male and female missionaries. Although it was common for the missionary wives of male missionaries to be less descriptive in their mission postings, Mabel’s are exceptional in their silence. There are only two biographical information forms on record for Mabel (1938, 1952). On the first of these there is a section that asks for “summary of labor, year by year, or in periods, until the present time, stating where and in what capacity performed, official or otherwise, with results. Be concise, yet give as many dates and details as possible.”⁹⁰ Mabel left this field completely blank despite having been in the mission field for sixteen years by this point. The second, and last, of the biographical information forms on record for Mabel was completed in 1952. This field is left blank in 1952, as well. On her last position of employment, she typed in simply, “Teaching--China.”⁹¹ This same omission is made with her educational background. She lists minimum educational background, despite having completed a practical nursing course at the Washington Missionary College sanitarium. This medical training would be essential as a China missionary; yet, there is no evidence of her having practiced as a nurse or having worked at a clinic.

The only evidence of Mabel Carter’s mission work is found in the church yearbook. Here she is listed as an English teacher–or in some cases as a teacher with the subject taught not indicated– during two periods of their thirty-seven years of service. She is listed as a teacher during several of their Hankou years (1930s) and during all of their Taiwan years (1950s). In total, she is listed as a teacher for fifteen years, less than half of the years they spent in the mission field.

As a result, Mabel’s voice as a missionary, or even as a missionary wife, is difficult to discern. Ironically, she is most visible when she writes of her husband’s struggles. Even here her voice does not reflect her own role as a missionary teacher, although perhaps it does reveal Mabel in the role most women can be found during this period of history; the supportive missionary wife and partner. Perhaps this is the voice she would have wanted future readers to hear most clearly, or perhaps not. Mabel’s death notice published in The Review and Herald a month after her death notes only that she was “wife of a former worker in China.⁹²

Later Life

Although they returned from the mission field, the Carters did not retire. In Virginia, where they settled, Cameron quickly became involved in his local church. He supervised the branch Sabbath School at the Montross church, and in October 1961 was named pastor of the Kilmarnock church near the Chesapeake Bay, where he pastored until May 1963.⁹³ Although retired, the Carters were still active in church work and in Tappahannock, Virginia, Cameron helped plant a new church in 1966. The company had been meeting in his and Mabel’s home until they built a church.⁹⁴ Most of the church members were medical professionals, and in 1967 through Elder Carter’s vision and effort, a new hospital was opened. The Columbia Union Visitor reported that Carter “was foremost in ... working to see the final creation of this institution.⁹⁵

Finally, in January 1977, Carter oversaw yet another church plant. This time in his hometown of Montross. This church was not only in his hometown but was built on land donated by the Carters, a piece of property where Cameron also had lived. It had been Carter’s dream to build an Adventist community on his property, although at the time of this publication, well over a half century later, most of the Adventists who initially moved to the property have passed away and their children have sold the land.⁹⁶ The church was named Carter Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church. It is near part of the old family farm named "China Hill," a name unrelated to his mission service and which seems likely to pre-date Cameron’s birth.⁹⁷ The church was dedicated on January 8, 1977, Mabel’s 80th birthday.⁹⁸

On April 6, 1978, Mabel Carter passed away in Tappahannock, Virginia.⁹⁹ She was eighty-four. Cameron remarried in September 1979. The woman he married was Mary Elizabeth Burrows Bramble, a widow fourteen years his junior. Carter was eighty-five, Mary was sixty-one.

For the next eight years Cameron and Mary lived in Virginia, until on May 5, 1987, twelve days before his ninety-third birthday, Cameron A. Carter passed away from coronary artery disease, atherosclerosis. ¹⁰⁰

Summary of Service

Location	Position	Dates
Columbia Union, United States	colporteur	1916--1920
Washington Missionary College, Maryland	student teacher (Bible and History)	1921--1922
Shanghai Missionary College	teacher	1922--1924
China Training Institute	registrar	1924--1927
Central China Union, China	Educational and MV secretary; director of the Normal Department of the China Theological Seminary	1928--1936
Hankow Bible Institute, China	principal	1931--1936
Takoma Adventist Academy, Maryland	Bible and English teacher while on furlough	1937--1938
China Training Institute, Hong Kong	dean, College of Education	1938--1939
China Training Institute & South China Training College, Hong Kong	president	1939--1942
Richmond Academy, Virginia	teacher	1943--1945
South China Union Mission, Hong Kong	professor and Education secretary	1948--1949
Warsaw, Virginia	self-supporting missionary	1949--1952
Taiwan Adventist College	president	1952--1959
Kilmarnock SDA Church, Virginia	pastor	1961--1963

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Notes