From Old Camp to Japan: William Turner’s letters home

A letter to Jim

Turner asked about Japanese persimmons and plums, described fruit he had tasted, and said he had paid a tree exporter to send his brother orange and persimmon trees. He could not remember whether Jim had confirmed receiving them. The letter documents an effort to exchange plants across the Pacific; their arrival remains unconfirmed. [1]

The writer was William Patillo Turner, the Will Turner remembered in Old Camp’s church history as a missionary to Japan. Following him beyond that brief notice brings a distant place into a familiar family story. [2]

The young man packing his trunks

Laura Haygood Turner’s 1951 history identifies Will as her uncle. Drawing on her father James H. Turner’s earlier account, she places the family’s move from Troup County to the Old Camp community in 1868. She also records the brothers’ attendance at the school on the church property. This is family and church testimony preserved many years afterward. [2]

A contemporary newspaper catches Will at the moment of departure. In an Atlanta Journal report reprinted by the Carroll Free Press on February 28, 1890, Claude N. Bennett described a young man packing his trunks for Japan. Turner was twenty-five, the son of a Carroll County farmer, and a recent Emory College graduate. [3]

His first assignment was to teach English in government schools through the YMCA’s Foreign Education Committee. The account says friends at Atlanta’s Grace Church gave him a Bible before he left. The journey was already understood as Christian service, but the formal Methodist appointment came later. [3]

Emory’s archival finding aid dates his entry into the Japan Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to 1893, after work at Kobe’s Palmore Institute. It places him on the Uwajima circuit in 1897. Keeping those stages separate helps explain why different records give different dates for the beginning of his missionary career. [4]

Five or six students around a Bible

One of the most revealing accounts comes from the Japanese side. In a 2002 study, scholar Yasuyoshi Sekiguchi quotes the memoir of Zōroku Fujioka, a former student in Uwajima. Fujioka remembered Turner holding a weekly English Bible class at home, usually attended by five or six students. Alice Turner sometimes took the English reading. [5]

Fujioka recalled being drawn first by curiosity and then by the teaching about God and His love. Reading the Bible deepened his thinking and his inward struggles. He also remembered an invitation to a party where he ate Western food for the first time. These are personal recollections quoted by a later researcher, rather than a contemporary attendance register. [5]

The small scale matters. A life that appears in a Georgia church history as overseas missionary service becomes, in a student’s memory, regular teaching, conversation and hospitality. His account lets us hear something of the learner’s experience without turning it into an unrecorded conversion story.

The community around him

Turner entered a church with a history of its own. Ehime Prefecture’s 1985 history describes Japanese residents helping bring the Lambuth missionaries to Uwajima in 1887, a decade before Turner’s appointment there. It records Japanese pastors and evangelists working alongside the foreign missionaries. [6]

The same history describes a women’s association organized in 1897. Its members included women outside the congregation; they invited poor older people living alone to a monthly meal, with conversation and Scripture. The record also names Harue Kodama, a Hiroshima Jogakuin childcare graduate, working with Mrs. Callahan in the later preschool. [6]

These people belong in the account because the work belonged to a community. A Georgian’s correspondence gives us one entrance into that history. Japanese records preserve other people who taught, organized and cared for their neighbors.

A school that remembered his name

Turner died in Hiroshima on March 10, 1912, according to Emory’s finding aid. [4] Four days later, the Carroll Free Press reported that James H. Turner had received a telegram announcing his brother’s sudden death. His wife and three children were in Japan. News had crossed the same ocean as the earlier letters, this time bringing grief. [8]

Kakujō Kindergarten, attached to Uwajima Nakanochō Church, tells a further part of the story on its own website. It traces its beginnings to Turner’s temporary use of the church building for early childhood education. A formally licensed school opened in 1917 in his memory as Turner Memorial Kakujō Nursery School. It took the name Kakujō Kindergarten in 1927 and marked its centenary in 2017. [7]

The memorial school therefore opened five years after his death. Turner’s earlier work was part of its origin; other people carried the institution forward. That distinction makes the connection more meaningful: remembrance became continuing work for children.

What he kept, and what others recovered

Turner also left albums that can now be examined online. On one digitized page, a tinted commercial photograph of the sacred bridge at Nikkō sits above a handwritten note discussing the bridge’s history and who could cross it. The page preserves both a purchased image and Turner’s attempt to explain it. His annotation is an observation to investigate, not an independent authority on the shrine’s history. [9]

The albums were not simply a set of photographs he took himself. Emory identifies commercial prints, along with family photographs and lantern slides, in the wider collection. [4] That matters when we ask whose eyes and whose work produced an image.

Other researchers have already done serious work here. Emory’s account of a 2016 exhibition describes eighteen students investigating Japanese objects and related archives in a 2015 course. Some objects had been sent by Turner in 1894 at Emory president Warren Akin Candler’s request. Our story builds on that scholarship and on Japanese local history; it makes no claim to a first discovery. [10]

Remembering home

These sources extend the story of Old Camp beyond the campground. They show a church member leaving Georgia, a family keeping in touch, students gathering for Bible reading, and a community remembering a teacher through education. They do not establish the size or spiritual character of a wider awakening.

There is room to be encouraged by patient Christian service while remaining humble about what a historical record can tell us. For Christians, Ephesians 2:8–10 keeps the order clear: salvation is God’s gift, received through faith in Jesus Christ; good works follow as its fruit. [11] A classroom, a letter and a remembered kindness are worth attending to without enlarging them into a legend.

Near the end of his 1894 letter, Turner described seeing American blackberry bushes in Tokyo. Amid all his interest in Japanese fruit, those familiar plants stirred a different feeling. His few words still bring the distance home. [1]

Sources and further reading

Sources reviewed October 18, 2026. Bracketed numbers lead to the supporting records below. Dates and measurements describe the historical record.

1. W. P. Turner, “Letter from Japan,” Carroll Free Press, June 15, 1894, p. 1
   Columns 2–3. Original scan inspected through Georgia Historic Newspapers. June 15 is the publication date; the letter is undated. The shipment’s receipt is not established.
2. Laura Haygood Turner, History of Old Camp Methodist Church, Carrollton Georgia (1951)
   Pitts Theology Library, MSS 028. Chapter 4 preserves James H. Turner’s 1934 family account; the missionary entry identifies Will’s service. Retrospective testimony; scanned text examined.
3. Claude N. Bennett, “Going to Japan,” Carroll Free Press, February 28, 1890, p. 1
   Column 3; reprinted from the Atlanta Journal. Scan inspected. Contemporary departure evidence supports 1890 rather than the 1891 arrival year given in Sekiguchi’s later account.
4. William Patillo Turner Photograph Collection, MSS 136, Pitts Theology Library
   Archival finding aid: career chronology, family, death and collection contents. This institutional summary is distinguished from Turner’s own writings.
5. Yasuyoshi Sekiguchi, A Study of Zouroku Fujioka (Part 1), Bunkyō University, 16(1), 2002
   PDF pp. 16–17, printed pp. 133–132, quote Fujioka’s memoir Father and Son. Japanese page images examined; English summaries are our paraphrases. The original memoir was not separately examined.
6. Ehime Prefectural History: Scholarship and Religion (March 31, 1985), Protestant churches
   The Uwajima Nakanochō Church subsection supplies local participants and the memorial preschool. Harue Kodama appears as 児玉春枝. Japanese historical account, summarized in English.
7. Kakujō Kindergarten, official institutional history
   Identifies W. P. Turner’s temporary preschool and the 1917 memorial opening. It does not date the earlier experiment. Later research gives conflicting early dates, which are not asserted here.
8. “W. P. Turner Dead,” Carroll Free Press, March 14, 1912, p. 1
   Column 4 below the cotton-market report. Scan inspected. The newspaper reports the telegram and sudden death; the precise death date and city come from source 4.
9. “View of the Shinkyo (sacred bridge) at Futarasan Shrine, Nikko,” Emory East Asia collection, item 552
   Original digitized album page visually inspected, including handwritten commentary. Commercial photograph dated approximately 1875–1895. Linked for examination; not reproduced here.
10. Emory University, “Exhibit explores 19th-century Asian artifacts from three special collections” (2016)
    Describes Cheryl Crowley’s students, the exhibition and the 1894 shipment to Emory. This museum shipment is separate from the fruit-tree arrangement in Turner’s letter.
11. Ephesians 2:8–10, King James Version
    Biblical basis for the closing Christian reflection, distinguished from the historical findings.