This Week in Texas Methodist History  Aug 2

Industry Methodists Give Farewell Supper on the Ground to Medical Missionaries Heading to China, August 1939

 

Ernst Weiss was a member of the Industry MEC church in western Austin County.  Although he had dropped out of high school to help on the farm, he received a divine call to become a missionary to India.  His faithful response to that call led him to Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio.  While there, he was a student pastor at Zion Methodist near Marion, Ohio.  One of his parishioners was a young woman named Hilda whom he eventually married.    Cincinnati was the hub of German Methodism.  It was the site of the German language newspaper for the MEC, and more importantly for our story, maintained teaching hospitals to train medical missionaries, both doctors and deaconesses.  Another Industry Methodist, Bertha Ott, had gone to Cincinnati and eventually became the head pharmacist at the teaching hospital.  Ernst moved to Cincinnati to become a physician.

 

When they finished their education, there was no opening in India but there was a spot at Nanchang, Jiangixi Province China.   Before they left, they came back to Industry for a farewell.  Ernst and Hilda had no way of knowing that the East Asian wars would make them refugees not once but twice. 

 

 

They were working in Nanchang when a letter from their bishop arrived on December 4, 1941 telling them to evacuate.  It was too late.  After Pearl Harbor Ernst and Hilda became enemy aliens because that part of China was under Japanese control.  On March 7 the Japanese closed the hospital and sent the enemy aliens to be interned in Shanghai. Hilda was pregnant at the time so the couple welcomed a daughter in their family while interned.

 

Eventually the Weiss family was exchanged for Japanese citizens who had been in Allied territory when the war started.  The internees were put on a vessel and sailed for Portuguese Goa where there was another liner filled with Japanese internees.  They traded places, and the Weiss family was back in America on December 1, 1943. 

 

They spent the war years giving talks in churches and with Ernst working at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, but in 1946 they were on their way back to China. 

 

They worked in China until 1951 when the Communist Chinese government expelled them.  They lived in Cincinnati from 1951 to 1955.  Since they could not return to China, they went to South Korea. They worked in South Korea until health issues resulted in an early retirement.  They lived in San Antonio at Morningside Manor where Ernst died in November 1984.   Hilda remarried a retired minister from the Texas Conference, Darwin Andrus.   Today Hilda, Ernst, and Darwin are buried at Industry in a pavilion overlooking a beautiful panoramic scene of field and forest—one of the most picturesque cemeteries in Texas.  It is beside the church where Ernst and Hilda had been honored with supper on the ground in 1939. 

 

This information is summarized from a fascinating memoir  Hilda’s Book:  Faithful to the End: American Missionary to China and Korea in the mid-twentieth Century © 2008 Hilda Weiss-Andrus and Elizabeth Weiss Richardson.    

 

This memoir is one of the great missionary memoirs of Methodism!