Page:The Souvenir of Western Women.djvu/117

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ROM the time of the organization of the first Baptist Church in the Northwest, the call came to our women to be co-laborers in lines of Christian work which especially appeal to women. This was the giving of the gospel to women in pagan lands. Besides these duties, the Baptist women have not been unmindful of the individual needs in their home churches and neighborhoods, or of the opportunities for service in various directions, as is evidenced by the Ladies' Aid Societies in our churches, the systematic calling upon strangers and the sick and poor.

For a time the mission circle was auxiliary to the Woman's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the West, which, with its sister society of the East, had been formed only the year before. Thus quick were the sisters of this remote territory to respond to calls and opportunities for help. By 1874 the missionary idea had so grown upon the coast that there was formed in San Francisco the Woman's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast, which claimed as one of its constituents this little band at Olympia, and also two more which had been first baptist church formed by this time at Elma and Seattle.

In 1876 Mrs. J. C. Baker, of Oakland, Cal., came to Oregon and organized some circles, among them one at Oregon City and another at Salem, making them auxiliary to the same general society at San Francisco. But two years later, as the distances were so great, making it impossible for delegates to gather from the remote fields, another general society, called the Woman's