Lillian Trasher
American christian missionary in Egypt
Lillian Hunt Trasher (27 September 1887 – 17 December 1961) was an American Christian missionary to Asyut, Egypt, as well as the founder of the first orphanage in Egypt. She is famed as the "Nile Mother" of Egypt.
Early life
Trasher was born in Jacksonville, Florida. Her mother was a Quaker, but became a Roman Catholic and Lillian was raised as a Catholic in Brunswick, Georgia. According to one account, her Quaker family had moved to the South after the Civil War.
Trasher came to the Holiness-Pentecostal faith through Miss Mattie Perry, an independent Holiness evangelist and activist.
While still in her late teens, Trasher attended Bible college for one term, and then worked at Miss Perry's Faith Orphanage in North Carolina in 1908–1910, after she failed to get a reporting job that she wanted. After becoming engaged to marry minister Tom Jordan, Trasher heard a missionary from India speak. Deciding that her mission lay in Africa, she broke off the engagement ten days before the wedding after her prospective husband failed to share her call. Trasher also taught at a second Bible school in South Carolina, pastored a Pentecostal church, and briefly travelled with an evangelist, but later returned to work again at the orphanage.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lillian Trasher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.