Guide to the McNeill Family Papers

Joseph McNeill was born in Philadelphia on July 20, 1893. He attended Haverford College (1915), Princeton University (1917) and Princeton Theological Seminary (1918). He drove an ambulance for the AEF in France in the summer and early fall of 1917. In 1918 he applied to the Board of Foreign Missions (PCUSA) and the following year he was sent to West Africa.

Lois Johnson was born in Los Angeles on October 14, 1898. She was the daughter of Silas Franklin and Mary Hays Johnson, pioneer missionaries in the Camerouns. Johnson attended Occidental College and taught at the Fort Mojave Indian school in Arizona before applying to the Board of Foreign Missions. In 1919 she was sent to the Camerouns, where she and Joseph McNeill met and married.

The McNeills spent fourteen years in the Cameroun, working at Foulassi, Elat, and Bafia stations. Their work was primarily evangelistic in nature. In 1932 the McNeills volunteered for reassignment to reopen Benito station, closed since 1924, in Spanish Guinea.

The mission work in Spanish Guinea was beset by difficulties; the primitive living conditions, the lack of roads, the strength of the Roman Catholic Church, and the hostility of the local government. By 1947 the presbytery of Corisco-Rio Muni was established; it was the only presbytery in the world on Spanish soil. The women of Spanish Guinea were the first in West Africa to organize a presbyterial. Upon the establishment of the independent Presbyterian Church and the dissolution of the mission in the Camerouns in 1957, the Presbytery in Spanish Guinea elected to revert to its former relationship with the Synod of New Jersey. The McNeills retired from missionary service in 1959.