Esther Tuttle Pritchard was an American editor, educator, minister, temperance worker, and missionary. Pritchard was the daughter of a minister of the Society of Friends. She was one of the leading preachers of the Friends' Society in the United States, and was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's Superintendent of the Department of Systematic Giving. Pritchard edited for some years the Friend's Missionary Advocate, and was a teacher in the Chicago Training School for Missions. Her husband's removal from Chicago to the pastorate of the Friends church, Kokomo, Indiana, severed her connection with the school add left her free to push the special work of her department. Seventeen State Unions subsequently adopted the department, while outside the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, ten Woman's Missionary Boards were influenced to create a similar agency.
Early years
Esther Wood was born in Morrow County, Ohio, January 26, 1840. She came from Quaker ancestry, and her ministerial ability was inherited from both parents. Her parents were Daniel Wood and his wife, Elizabeth Lancaster Wood. Daniel was a preacher, and there were a number in her mother's family. A happy girl, strong-willed and ambitious, it was not until a time of sorrow that she yielded to her vocation. She spent her childhood in Morrow County, and received her early education there.
Career
In her young womanhood, while a student at Delaware College, she met and afterward married Prof. Lucius Tuttle, a volunteer in the Civil War, who had survived a long imprisonment in Libby, Tuscaloosa and Salisbury to devote the remainder of his life to the profession of teaching. The couple had one daughter, who died at the age of twenty-two months. The death of the child was a marked period in the Christian experience of the mother. While converted in early life, it was not until the death of her infant, Mary, that Pritchard was able to truly give herself to God. She was duly recorded a Minister of the Gospel, and spent considerable time in evangelistic work, mainly in Ohio and on the Atlantic Coast. Prof. Tuttle died in 1881. In 1884, Pritchard was chosen by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Union of Friends in America to edit the Friend's Missionary Advocate, the organization's official organ, and took up her headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly after her removal to that city, she married Calvin W. Pritchard, editor of the Christian Worker, with whom she had a happy marriage. She rendered valuable assistance to her husband in his labors as editor of the Christian Worker, and later in his pastoral work in Kokomo, Indiana, where she spent the last thirteen years of her life. For six years, Pritchard served as the editor and manager of the Friends Missionary Advocate, and her interest in missions continued unabated. It was largely through her influence that the Friends Mission was established in Nanjing, China. For several years, she was a national officer of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Mr. Pritchard died in 1886, and in that year, she became the proprietor of the Friend's Missionary Advocate. Pritchard continued to edit and publish the paper with a marked degree of success until the autumn of 1890, when it passed by gift from her to the Woman's Foreign Missionary Union of Friends. Her work, A Responsive Reading on Proportionate and Systemic Giving. With catalogue of books on this subject. could be procured at the Woman's Foreign Missionary Union of Friends in America, in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. She was a contemporary of Frances E. Willard, and Esther Pugh. During the period of 1891-93, she was actively engaged as teacher of the English Bible in the Chicago training school for city, home and foreign missions, besides acting as superintendent of the systematic-giving department of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She was a good Bible scholar, and an effective Bible teacher. Her serious concern was that the Church might be preserved from the influences of destructive "Biblical criticism". Frail health imposed limitations upon taking on additional work.
Personal life
She made her home in Western Springs, Illinois. Her last sickness, being of short duration, and she unconscious a part of the time, it seemed Pritchard did not realize her approaching death. She died on the morning ofAugust 6, 1900.
