Some people pursue their life’s work in their hometowns; others make their way into the world.
One local man who traveled halfway around the world for his calling was Reverend Levi Spaulding, who was born in Jaffrey in 1791 but spent his adult life in Ceylon, the country now known as Sri Lanka, an island off the southern tip of India.
Spaulding spent his youth on the farm of his parents, Phineas and Elizabeth (Bailey) Spaulding. He studied with Reverend John Sabin of Fitzwilliam, and then attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1815. From there, he went on to Andover Theological Seminary, picking up a divinity degree in 1818. He was ordained as a missionary later that year.
A few months later, Spaulding and his new wife, Mary Christie of Antrim, began a long journey that would take them to a new life. On June 8, 1819, they boarded a ship bound for Ceylon, a voyage of nearly six months. They arrived on Dec. 1. The couple spent a year in Oodooville, seven years in Manipay, seven years in Tellipaly and another year in Oodooville. In 1834, Spaulding started the American Ceylon Mission in Madura, India.
The Jaffrey man’s mission was one of words: He put together a textbook series for village school, and in 1842 published a dictionary in Tamil, the language of Ceylon. The next year, he compiled an English-Tamil dictionary, which was updated and reissued in 1852. He also compiled the “Tamil Union Dictionary.”
During Spaulding’s tenure as a missionary, Ceylon saw many changes. In an 1872 letter to his brother Daniel, reprinted in the Jaffrey town history, he wrote about some of those changes:
“When I came all our roads and highways were either foot-paths or gutters for the waters to run in and off. People were lazy, given to and fond of wickedness and lawsuits, and the revenue was very little. Now the mud house is exchanged for stone or brick. Agriculture then was neglected, but now old fields are cultivated, and new wells dug, and new gardens occupied. Roads checkering the whole district are macadamized, so that the bandy wheel runs as smoothly as on an iron rail. Most of the men can read, and some hundred women have been educated. Now we have dictionaries, and a pretty good supply of common-school books, and a good stock of Bibles and tracts, with religious reading, all in Tamil. Hundreds can speak English, or more probably, thousands. We have well educated native pastors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, interpreters and overseers, besides many writers in courts and cutcheries.”
Spaulding had returned to the U.S. in 1864, and was awarded an honorary degree by his alma mater, Dartmouth College. Then, he made his way back to Ceylon, where he continued his missionary work until he died in 1873 at the age of 82.
A Look Back was originally published in the Monadnock Ledger.