Guide to the Scovel Family Papers

Carl Wadsworth Scovel was born in 1866. He attended Hamilton and Roberts Colleges and Auburn Theological Seminary, graduating in 1894. In 1900 he married Louise Gilman Kiehle, a graduate of the Curry School of Public Expression in Boston. At this time he was serving as pastor of the Babcock Brown Memorial Church in Baltimore. Their only child, Frederick, was born there in 1902. In 1912 Scovel accepted a call to the Presbyterian Church in Cortland, NY; he served that congregation until his death in 1932.

Frederick Gilman Scovel entered Hamilton College in 1921. He went on to take his medical degree at Cornell, where he met a nurse named Myra Scott. They married after his graduation in 1929 and the following year they and their newborn son sailed for China as employees of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.

After language training in Peking, the Scovels were assigned to a hospital in Shantung Province. In 1943 the entire family, which had grown to include four more children, was interned by the Japanese. After six months' detention the Japanese deported them to the United States; Myra Scovel gave birth to a sixth child within hours after their ship docked in New York Harbor.

In 1946 the Scovels returned to China, this time to Anhwei Province. They transferred to the Hackett Medical Center in Canton in 1948, remaining there until 1951 when they were forced out by the Chinese Communists. In 1953 they began a six-year term of service to the India Mission, working as professor and librarian at the Christian Medical College in Ludhiana. In 1959 they returned to the United States for the last time. Dr. Scovel began a private practice in Stony Point, NY, and Myra Scovel wrote several books, some based on her family's China and India experiences and some written for children.