Retirement
In 1915, Wells retired as Bishop of Spokane, recommending that a younger man would be much more suited to the rigors of horseback and stagecoach travel that was so much a part of his position. His report read as follows:
"When I first came to Eastern Washington as a missionary in 1871 I found only six communicants of the Church and nothing more in this whole district; no clergymen, no institutions. Now we have three thousand communicants, twenty clergymen, with twenty-two lay readers, ministering to sixty churches and missions. We have in successful operation – three boarding and day schools with twenty teachers and two hundred pupils, a hospital with fifty beds; a Church home for children with room for twenty-five orphans I doubt if any one of our mission fields can show a more remarkable growth toward self-support."
Bishop Wells and his third wife, Jane Sheldon (Henrietta Garretson having died in 1903) moved to Tacoma in their retirement. Wells was petitioned by the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane to record his memoirs upon his retirement in 1915, and in 1931 these were published as "A Pioneer Missionary." Wells died in 1936.
Read more about this topic: Lemuel H. Wells
Famous quotes containing the word retirement:
“Douglas. Now remains a sweet reversion—
We may boldly spend, upon the hope
Of what is to come in.
A comfort of retirement lives in this.
Hotspur. A rendezvous, a home to fly unto.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Adultery itself in its principle is many times nothing but a curious inquisition after, and envy of another man’s enclosed pleasures: and there have been many who refused fairer objects that they might ravish an enclosed woman from her retirement and single possessor.”
—Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)