Laura Askew Haygood
1845 - 1900
The sister of Atticus G. Haygood, Laura was an educator and foreign missionary to China. She received her B.A. degree from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia in 1865, the first college in the world chartered to grant degrees to women. She opened her own high school that same year, which later merged with Girls’ High School in Atlanta. Haygood served as both educator and principal while also establishing mission societies that provided food and shelter to the disadvantaged. She also founded industrial schools to train people for the skills they would need to hold self-supporting jobs.
Laura Haygood was asked many times to take a leadership role in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, requests that were unprecedented for women at the time, but she declined, saying that she felt she was needed too much by the home mission work of her church. Her dedication to her work was so strong that she chose not to marry and, in 1884, became the first woman missionary sent to a foreign post by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church when she was sent to China. Working with fellow American Methodist missionary,
Laura Haygood was asked many times to take a leadership role in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, requests that were unprecedented for women at the time, but she declined, saying that she felt she was needed too much by the home mission work of her church. Her dedication to her work was so strong that she chose not to marry and, in 1884, became the first woman missionary sent to a foreign post by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church when she was sent to China. Working with fellow American Methodist missionary,
