TURNER, WILLIAM PATILLO.
Photograph collection, ca. 1890-1911.

MANUSCRIPT NUMBER 136

ACCESS: Unrestricted

REPRODUCTION: All requests subject to limitations noted in departmental policies on reproduction.

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CITATION:  William Patillo Turner Photograph collection, MSS 136, Archives and Manuscripts Dept., Pitts Theology Library, Emory University. 

William Patillo Turner was born on April 6, 1864 in Troup County, Georgia, to H. S. and Martha Patillo Turner.  He graduated from Emory College in 1889.  He joined the Japan Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1893 after having served as a supply instructor at the Palmore Institute, a night school for young men, in Kobe, Japan, for two years.  He remained at Palmore until 1897 when he was appointed to the Uwajima circuit in the Kobe district where he served with his wife and children  until 1911.  He died in Hiroshima on March 10, 1912, shortly after leaving Uwajima.

Turner was from the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  He married Mrs. Allie (Alice Mae) Burke of Benton Harbor, Michigan, on September 8, 1896.  The Turners had three children:  Katharyn, William, and John.

This collection of lantern slides and black-and-white photographs contains images of the Turner and Callahan families during the time that they served together as Methodist missionaries to Japan.  William Jackson Callahan, a cousin of Turner, was also from the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  Included in the slide collection are images of Japanese natives including governmental officials, Buddhist priests, and Methodist ministers.  Also included are temples and other buildings and the Japanese countryside.  Few of the slides are labeled.  Some were commercially produced.

The two bound volumes contain commercially produced prints with handwritten commentary by Turner, addressing the historical or cultural significance of each scene.   An exception is Turner's description of the Kobe Club, which although constructed for foreigners, is "not for Missionaries."  The first volume includes fifty tinted prints of various tourist attractions, street scenes, and agricultural products.  There is a photograph of Bishop Galloway and Rev. W. W. Wadsworth pasted onto the print of the great bell at Nara.  The second volume contains fifty prints of staged domestic scenes, merchants and artisans at work, and silk production.  The last print is a collage of the faces of 1700 babies taken by a Tokyo photographer during a ten year period.  Of interest to the researcher will be the dress and culture of late nineteenth century Japan represented in the prints.

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