Elizabeth Williams Ross

(February 16, 1852 – September 12, 1926)

Teacher at the Southern Christian Institute; matron of Lida's Wood

Acknowledged simply as "Mother Ross" by all who knew her, it is quite possible that Elizabeth Williams Ross was the most beloved woman ever associated with the history of Eureka College. The intensity of adulation and acclaim associated with her name and legacy seems to rise nearly to levels comparable with sainthood.

Elizabeth Williams was born in Indiana. As a young woman she was educated in Dayton, Ohio, where she joined the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). She married Allison T. Ross and the couple had two children—a daughter who died as an infant and a son (Emory) who became a well known Christian missionary in Africa.

The Ross family enthusiastically supported missionary activities—both domestic and foreign. Mary Williams Ross joined the Christian Woman's Board of Missions (CWBM) when it was organized in 1874 and she recruited members to join the new organization and support its efforts. She visited churches in Canada and throughout much of the United States to promote CWBM activities. It was said that she had a phenomenal memory and even many years later, she remembered the names of church men and women whom she had visited in her earlier travels.

"Mother" Ross was instrumental in founding the Southern Christian Institute (SCI) in Edwards, Mississippi, in the 1870s, and she also taught at that institution for several years starting in 1897. Located in the buildings that had once formed part of a southern cotton plantation, the SCI was established to provide education to African American children in the generation following the U.S. Civil War. The school also provided adult literacy programs with evening sessions.

Finding a way to combine her interest in the foreign and domestic missions, "Mother" Ross organized a project whereby students from Jamaica came to the United States where they would study for two years at SCI and then complete their studies at Eureka College. It is highly likely that the first black students to study at Eureka College did so as a result of "Mother" Ross's innovative program of study. (Arnold Nathaniel Shirley; Charles Samuel Shirley, Louis Thomas, and Henry Alexander Cotterell all studied at Eureka College through this exchange program.)

At the SCI commencement exercises in 1907 a white Presbyterian minister of Edwards, Mississippi, publicly stated the following to “Mother” Ross: “For seventeen years I have watched this school I have seen you insulted. I have heard disparaging things said of you, but, thank God, you have won out. Every reliable man of this community is a friend of this school.”

Emory Ross, the only surviving child in the Ross household, studied at Eureka College and graduated with the Class of 1907. He married Myrta Maud Pearson and the young couple moved to Africa to do missionary work in the Belgian Congo. "Mother" Ross wrote a letter to her son Emory every single day, never knowing if they would arrive at their final destination or whether Emory would be alive to read her words when they arrived. When her husband, Allison T. Ross, died in 1913, "Mother" Ross traveled by train with his body from Edwards, Mississippi, to Eureka, Illinois, knowing that her son was thousands of miles away in Bolenge. Yet, in the absence of family, she found herself surrounded by love in her vast extended family in Eureka.

After her husband's death, "Mother" Ross remained in Eureka where she served as the house mother for the women who lived in Lida's Wood for eleven years. There she inspired a new generation of young Eureka women to consider lives of service in the Christian missions. She did return periodically to visit her friends in Mississippi at SCI. She died in Edwards, Mississippi, but her body was returned to Eureka where she was buried with her husband.

Elizabeth Williams Ross wrote a brief autobiography titled A Road of Remembrance (1921) and a collection of her sayings and writings was published after her death under the title The Golden Room (1927).