Tarleton Perry Crawford

Tarleton Perry Crawford (May 8, 1821 – April 7, 1902) was a linguist and Baptist missionary to Shandong, China, living there for 50 years with his wife, Martha Foster Crawford.

Early life and education Crawford was born in Warren County, Kentucky. He was the fourth son of John and Lucretia Crawford, who were Baptists. He had a believer's baptism at the age of sixteen.

Crawford worked on a farm in Denmark, Tennessee to help pay for his early education. He attended the Denmark Male Academy where he was top of his class. The Big Hatchie Baptist Association helped pay his way to Union University. The women of Browns Creek, Big Black Creek, Maple Springs and Clover Creek Baptist churches all sold their eggs and milk gathered on Sundays to help support him, and later Lottie Moon. He was first ordained by the Big Black Creek Baptist Church in Denmark, Tennessee. Brother Obediah Dodson was his pastor and was very passionate about missions.

Marriage and family Crawford married fellow Baptist Martha Foster. They married on March 12, 1851, at her home in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, a week after their engagement.

Sometime after arriving in Shanghai, building on a romanised script produced by Rev. Dr. Taylor deemed inadequate for articulating Shanghainese phonology, Crawford would publish a phonetic script for the language. This script was widely used amongst missionaries in translating religious materials into Shanghainese, including some produced by himself and his wife, and several books were written in it by 1885. However, it fell into obscurity several decades later. Examples of translated materials include The Lord's Prayer, and The Sources of Good and Evil. He also composed some of his own hymns. Crawford would diverge from orthodox Latin-based interpretations of grammar systems common at the time and instead invent terms within and specifically for Chinese, some of which remain in use today. However, the script would see little use outside of a local method of phonologically describing Mandarin in Shandong schools. These would see mixed responses within The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, with criticisms largely centring around the homophony within the Chinese language system.

Crawford insisted that preaching was the sole duty of the missionary. He was dismayed by the fiasco involving Charles Gutzlaff's Chinese evangelists. He thereafter insisted that the Chinese should never be paid out of mission funds. His friend Dr. George Burton's becoming exhausted due to excessive medical work in Shanghai reinforced Crawford's central conviction. Crawford itinerated widely around local villages (131 in 1875 alone). His singlemindedness meant that he closed down his wife's school in 1879, perhaps out of jealousy at her success with Lottie Moon at Shaling.

He continued to criticize the mission board of the American Southern Baptist Mission, which he thought should have no say on mission matters. They disagreed and removed him in 1892.

In 1890, Crawford formed the Gospel Mission Association of North China, (Hyatt, 1976:59)

Martha Crawford remained loyal to her husband, although she disagreed with several of his views. In 1867 she formed a boys' school in their home. Several of the students went on to become pastors at the successful Huangxian and Pingdu stations. She also wrote The Three Maidens, a book for children, which was subsequently widely used throughout China. At the Second Missionary Conference (1877), she spoke on "Women's Work for Women", stressing missionary wives should visit house-to-house, personally instruct local women, and prepare suitable literature for them.

In his book The Patriarchal Dynasties, Crawford announced his conviction that in 1876 the world was 14,376 years old. He believed that the Garden of Eden was a theocratic confederacy, with a potential population of 1,174,405,120- though he concedes that the actual number "doubtless fell far below" this figure.

Publications Crawford, T.P. (1852). Chinese Immigration to the U.S. in Tennessee Baptist, January 8, 1853, p. 3. Shanghai. https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/crawford.t.p.china.immigration.1852.html Crawford, T.P. (1853). Communications in Tennessee Baptist, April 23, 1853, p. 1. Shanghai. https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/crawford.t.p.letter.1853.html Crawford T. P. (1869). 文學書官話 [Mandarin Grammar] (Zhang R., Trans.). American Presbyterian Mission Press. https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCL-003890150/reader Crawford, T. P. (1870). Letter from Tung-Chow to the Editor of the Chinese Recorder. The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, 3(1), 25. https://books.google.no/books?id=PcELAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA25 Crawford, T. P. (1871). The Time of our Saviour's Crucifixion and Resurrection. The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, 4(10), 257. Crawford, T.P. (1877). The patriarchal dynasties from Adam to Abraham, shown to cover 10,500 years, and the highest human life only 187. Richmond, VA: Joseph Ryland & Co. https://archive.org/details/patriarchaldynas00crawrich/ Crawford, T. P. (1888). A System of Phonetic Symbols for writing the Dialects of China. The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, 19(3), 101–110. Crawford, T.P. (Baker, Russell P., ed.) (1892). Churches, to the Front! in A Baptist Source Book. https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/crawford.t.p.churchs.frnt.html