Rev. William Ward Meriam
On 22 April 1859, the Protestant missionary William Merriam and his wife were appointed as missionaries to the newly established missionary station in Plovdiv. This appointment formed part of a coordinated policy between the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Methodist Mission aimed at curbing the ambitions of the Catholic Uniate movement in the Balkans. The year 1859 marked the planned beginning of coordinated missionary activity on both sides of the Balkan Range. In 1857, Albert Long and Wesley Prettyman settled in Shumen (then Shumla). On Christmas Eve 1859, Dr. Long began holding regular worship services in the old capital Tarnovo, documenting a financial donation for a chitalishte (community cultural center) in which these services were to be conducted.
Almost simultaneously, in 1858, the Congregationalist Charles Morse settled in Sofia by appointment dated 26 March 1858, while the missionary Theodore Byington was appointed to Stara Zagora on 4 September 1858. Their settlement, as well as that of the missionary Merriam family in Plovdiv, is described in a letter from K. Vasilev to Nayden Gerov dated 15 October 1859. Prof. Hristo Hristov correctly notes the date of Merriam’s appointment to Plovdiv as 22 April 1859, as recorded in the archives of the American Board, whereas P. Angelova describes their later return to the city with the Clark family in October of the same year and therefore erroneously identifies Clark as “the first Protestant missionary in Plovdiv.” According to the American Board archives, however, Clark arrived half a year after Merriam.
The arrival of the Merriam family in Bulgaria marked the long-awaited beginning of serious activity aimed at the construction of churches in Sofia, Bansko, and Plovdiv, together with a school, as well as a similar institution in Stara Zagora. Rev. William Ward Merriam completed his theological studies at Harvard at the age of twenty-three and graduated from Andover Seminary only three years later. He married Susan Dimon on 1 September 1858 and was ordained by the Congregational Church on 28 November of the same year. His wife had been a long-serving teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On 17 January 1859, the couple sailed together for Smyrna, arriving there on 22 February. Almost immediately, on 12 March, a decision was taken to open a missionary station in Plovdiv. The Merriams then traveled to Adrianople (Edirne), where on 22 April 1859 they were formally appointed missionaries to Plovdiv and subsequently made several journeys to the city. In the autumn of the same year, the Clark family arrived from America and joined the new missionary station. The first missionary report from Plovdiv in 1859 states:
“On the part of the Bulgarians there exists a strong desire that the Bible be read in their native language… extensive fields, ripe for harvest, are open to native preachers, book distributors, and teachers… The Bulgarian nation is awakening to a new political life… No labor or sacrifice should be spared in order that these people may also be awakened to spiritual life.”
From the founding of the missionary station in Plovdiv, Protestant worship services were held every Sunday in Turkish, and the Bulgarian attendees soon expressed a desire to hear preaching in their own language. After the arrival of the Clark family in Plovdiv, a Bible study group was organized in their home. Following an unsuccessful rental agreement for a Greek-owned house, the missionaries rented the house of A. Zagarlia on Dzhambaz Tepe, where regular prayer meetings were attended by twelve to fifteen young Bulgarians.
On 21 July 1860, Merriam recorded in his diary: “Today Mr. Clark opened the school…” The first pupil was Zelo Mihailov from Chirpan, born in 1840, who had attended the Protestant college in Malta. Prior to the opening of the mission school, on 16 July, the pasha had been officially informed and exclaimed: “If all Protestant missionaries had begun with schools, they would have achieved far greater success.”
His comment demonstrates that the activities of the missionaries and the effectiveness of their educational work were well known to the authorities long before 1859–1860. On 24 November 1860, the Clark family rented a new residence due to the growing number of students. There were now five: Petar Musevich from Pazardzhik and Nikola Boyadzhiev from Panagyurishte, later joined by Georgi Penev from Chirpan, Ivan Tondzhorov from Samokov, and Andrey S. Tsanov from the Orhanie (Botevgrad) region. The Sunday school was attended by an additional seven to eight Bulgarian youths. Only two years later, students from the Protestant school were already singing a Bulgarian hymn in the church of St. Theotokos on the feast of Cyril and Methodius.
In the summer of 1862, the Merriam family traveled to Constantinople for the annual mission meeting. They were accompanied by their ten-month-old daughter Mary (born 27 August 1861, not a five-year-old son as erroneously stated by E. Shelton), while Susan Merriam was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. At the meeting with missionaries Morse and Byington, the expansion of the Bulgarian mission was discussed, which already counted thirty-two adherents in Plovdiv, Sofia, and Stara Zagora.
On 3 July 1862, the day before the American national holiday, while returning from the annual meeting along the road between Harmanli and Haskovo, in the region of Uzundzhovo, the Merriam family was attacked by brigands. A detailed account of the incident is found in a letter from Rufus Anderson, President of the American Board, dated 12 August 1862. The attack was carried out by five armed horsemen. Upon their appearance, the caravan’s guard – consisting of two well-armed mounted zaptiehs – fled without resistance, abandoning fifteen people traveling in five covered wagons. During the pursuit, a firefight ensued, and Merriam drew his own Colt revolver to defend his pregnant wife, who was holding their daughter. In response, the brigands opened fire, killing one of the horses and wounding two or three of the travelers. Merriam himself was struck by two bullets in his right side and died on the spot. He was only thirty-one years old.
His pregnant wife single-handedly defended her husband’s lifeless body and their infant daughter while the brigands looted the wagons. Two extraordinarily difficult days followed, during which Mrs. Merriam managed to transport her husband’s body to the nearest village. There she was met by a dispatched müdür, who assisted with the journey to Plovdiv. Burial could not be delayed, and under the protection of the British and Austrian consuls, it was carried out immediately in an Orthodox church. Some 20 days later, the trauma of the incident led to a premature birth, during which Mrs. Merriam died on 25 July 1862, together with her unborn twins. A special memorial service was held on 14 September of the same year by Rev. James Murray at the American Board’s Congregational church on Prospect Street in Cambridge.
The Merriams’ one-year-old daughter, Mary, was left a complete orphan in the very country to which God had called her parents as missionaries. She returned to Boston only on 12 May of the following year, aboard the sailing bark Smyrniota (owned by the Armenian merchant Marko Nikola Regio), which maintained a direct route between Smyrna and Boston. She was raised in the family of her uncle, John Newton Merriam, a prominent industrialist in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A high price – too often underestimated today – paid for the existence of an Evangelical church in Plovdiv.
Dony K. Donev, D.Min., is a prominent researcher and author specializing in Bulgarian Protestant, Evangelical, and Pentecostal history, with over three decades of study. His work, including 19th Century History of Protestantism in Bulgaria and The Unforgotten: Historical and Theological Roots of Pentecostalism in Bulgaria, documents the development of these movements, their suppression under Communism, and the subsequent post-1989 revival. Key aspects of Donev’s research on Bulgarian Protestant history include:
Origins (19th Century): Protestant work began in the 1800s, with denominations like Congregationalists (1856), Methodists (1857), and Baptists (1865) establishing missions, culminating in the first Bulgarian Protestant Church in 1871. Donev also highlights the 1871 publication of the Protestant Bulgarian Bible translation. His research, often in collaboration with the Institute of Bulgarian Protestant History, has focused on preserving, digitizing, and recovering documents, including church diaries, photographs, and, in some cases, saving records from destruction during the communist era.
