Miron Winslow

Miron Winslow (11 December 1789 – 22 October 1864) was an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionary to the American Ceylon Mission, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he established a mission at Oodooville and founded a seminary. He founded a mission station at Madras, the first and chief station of the American Madras Mission. Harriet Winslow, his wife, also served as a missionary alongside and wrote a memoir thereof.

He published several books, notably, A History of Missions and A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil, a Tamil to English lexicon which took twenty years of missionary labor to compile sixty-seven thousand Tamil words. This dictionary was based in part on manuscript material of the pastor Joseph Knight, of the London Missionary Society, and the Rev. Samuel Hutchings, of the American mission, and was the most complete dictionary of a modern Indian language published at that time. The book later become the basis for the more exhaustive Tamil Lexicon dictionary published by the University of Madras in 1924.

John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State (1953-1959), and Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the CIA (1953-1961), were his great-grandchildren through his daughter Harriet Lathrop Winslow and her husband John Welsh Dulles.

Biography

Early life He was born in Williston, Vermont, on December 11, 1789, to Anna Kellogg and Nathaniel Winslow. At the age of fourteen, he began his career as a store clerk and later established himself in business in Norwich, Connecticut, where he was employed for two years.