Lucy Whitehead McGill Waterbury Peabody

Lucy Whitehead McGill Waterbury Peabody (1861–1949) was an American Baptist missionary. She was influential in Baptist foreign missions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Biography Lucy Whitehead McGill was born in Belmont, Kansas, on March 2, 1861, to Sarah and John McGill. She attended secondary school in Rochester, New York, graduating from New York's Rochester Academy in 1878 and attending classes at the University of Rochester. She was a teacher at the Rochester State School for the Deaf for three years. McGill married Norman W. Waterbury, a Baptist minister, in 1881. They moved to Madras, India and were missionaries among the Telugu people. Reverend Waterbury died in 1886. Lucy then came back to Rochester and in 1889 moved to Boston. She served as home secretary of the Woman's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the East in 1890. She oversaw new missionary recruitment and the production of literature. That year she founded the girls' auxiliary to the mission, the Farther Lights Society. She also worked to establish an annual day of prayer for missions, later known as the World Day of Prayer. Her presidency ended due to opposition to women in leadership and disparate theological views.