Since I’ve spent a lot of time in the archives this month, I thought I’d end the week by sharing some glimpses of how women show up at what’s called The History Center: Archives of Bethel University and Converge, housed in Bethel’s Lakeside Center (the former seminary building).
Most importantly, our current archivist — like her predecessor — is a woman. Rebekah Bain came to Bethel in 2021 after completing graduate degrees in history and library science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She followed in the footsteps of someone I’ve mentioned before: Diana Davis Magnuson ’88, who returned to her alma mater in 1994 as the first woman to teach full-time as a Bethel history professor.
In the main archives room itself, the extensive collection of historical paraphernalia includes the images of at least four women from the history of Bethel. First, the two flanking a portrait of a young John Alexis Edgren:
• Left: Esther Sabel has already come up several times in this project, as the first woman to teach at Bethel Seminary. She initially came to Bethel in 1924 to lead the Bible and Missionary Training School, eventually retiring from the College faculty in 1958.
• Right: Margreta Olson was a schoolteacher in Elfdalen, Sweden when she married Olof Bodien, who went on to pastor First Swedish Baptist Church in Minneapolis from 1893 to his death in 1912. She organized the Bethel Women’s Federation in 1916 and helped pave the way for the construction of the women’s dormitory on the Snelling Avenue campus that came to bear her name. (Of course, Bodien lives on as the name of a coed freshman residence on the Arden Hills campus.)
Then two women missionaries:
• Left: in 1913 Olivia Johnson became the first graduate of Bethel Academy to go into the foreign missions field, serving in the Philippines. While home on furlough in 1919, she died in the ongoing influenza pandemic — the same day that the post-WWI peace conference opened at Versailles.
• Right: Hilda Lund graduated from the Academy in 1918, then trained as a nurse at the Swedish Hospital of Minneapolis. She married Edgar Moorish and went to the Belgian Congo with the American Baptist Foreign Missions Society in 1922, dying four years later.
The History Center also includes a historical display area in what used to be the second floor of the Seminary Library. One panel tells the story of the first Swedish-American Baptist missionary, a schoolteacher from Minnesota named Johanna Anderson (mentioned in my earlier post on women in Adolf Olson’s Centenary History of Bethel’s denomination).
You can see more of the archives by following the History Center on Instagram or Facebook. If you want to support its work, consider joining the Friends of the History Center.
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 