Guide to the Francis Randolph Crawford and Paxton Crawford Papers

Francis Randolph Crawford and Martha Paxton Crawford were missionaries to China for the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. Executive Committee of Foreign Missions.

Francis Randolph Crawford was born in 1884 to Mr. and Mrs. C. Gratton Crawford, apple farmers in Kernstown, Virginia. As a boy he attended the Opequon Presbyterian Church where both his father and grandfather served as elders. Schooled at "Carysbrooke" and the Shenandoah Valley Academy, he entered Washington and Lee University in 1903. In 1904 he announced to his family that he felt called to the medical field and hoped to go to China as a medical missionary. After finishing his undergraduate studies in three years, he went to Johns Hopkins Medical School. Upon completion of his course of study in 1911, Crawford continued his preparation as a surgeon at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh, at the hospital at Clifton Springs, New York, and finally, in the autumn of 1913, he traveled to Germany to complete his studies.

In February of 1914, Crawford left Germany and traveled through Switzerland and Italy en route to China. He arrived in April and assumed his position as chief surgeon at the Mid-China Mission in Kiangyin. In May of 1917, Francis Crawford married Martha Paxton "Paxie" Moffett. In September of that same year, the Crawfords moved to the Kashing Hospital, the largest Presbyterian Church in the U.S. mission hospital in China. The hospital had 200 beds, a large outpatient clinic, and a school of nursing which trained fifty or more student nurses a year. Crawford was the only surgeon at Kashing, and he also served as the hospital’s superintendent for ten years. Paxton Crawford engaged in evangelistic work for the mission.

By the mid-1920s the political situation in China was rapidly deteriorating. In 1927, under pressure to leave, the Crawfords left Kashing and went to Shanghai. Later, the mission compound was taken over by soldiers, and the Crawfords decided that the situation was dire enough to leave. Upon their return to the United States, the Crawfords settled in Farmville, Virginia. For two and a half years Crawford ran a private practice, but the couple decided to return to mission work in China in June of 1930 and served until 1933.

The Crawfords returned to Farmville, where Dr. Crawford worked as a surgeon at the Southside Community Hospital for many years. He then worked as a general practitioner until his retirement on January 1, 1965. Active in his church, he served as a ruling elder, and was elected as moderator of his presbytery and as commissioner to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. He died in 1966. Paxton Crawford died in 1981.