Carrol Frederick Eaglesfield, 1915-2006

Carrol Frederick Eaglesfield was born in Garden City, Kansas , August 16, 1915 and lived in Oklahoma and Arkansas as a young child. He graduated from Clinton High School in 1933, went on to college at Southwest Baptist College in Bolivar, Missouri ; Texas Christian College ; and graduated from the Universtity of Missouri .

A dedicated hunter, fisher and trapper in his teens, he had fantasies of making a living in Alaska as a big game hunter and guide, but was too sensible to pursue this idea. What he actually planned was a career in pharmacy or medicine and thus he majored in organic chemistry in college. This inclination toward the scientific study of the natural world, and an active personal role in the outdoors never really left him, and returned full force in the 1960s.

But in the 1930s and 1940s his life took a different turn. He heard, and heeded, God's call to the ministry and to the foreign mission field. He took a Doctor of Divinity degree at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth , Texas . By then he had already pastored at small country churches in western Missouri , and after finishing seminary he pastored at churches in east Texas and northern Louisiana . While at one of these churches, the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, headquartered in Richmond , Virginia , appointed him to the mission field. By mutual agreement, the particular field was Africa , a good fit for a man who was a natural hunter and who had been deeply dismayed by the racism he had come face to face with in the deep South of the 30s and 40s.

By this time he had a young family, having married Ida Pauline (Polly) Gadberry in 1937. They had a son, George David, born in 1941, and a daughter, Carol Ann, born in 1944. Curiously, both children, like their mother, were called by their middle names their entire life.

In early 1945 the family flew by seaplane to the Azores , then on to Lisbon , Portugal , where they were off-loaded to await transportation south to West Africa . But planes departing Portugal for destinations south and west were scarce in early 1945, since Germans fleeing Europe were paying huge sums to the local airline representatives in Portugal and Spain for seats on planes bound for West Africa and on across to Brazil and Argentina .

Weeks later, the family arrived in West Africa , specifically Nigeria , where Carrol and Polly lived and worked until 1965.

Carrol's first assignment in Nigeria , after six months of language study (Yoruba) and orientation, was to the staff of the Nigerian Baptist Seminary in Ogbomosho (pronounced roughly "oag-BOME-oh-shaw" with the O's sounded about midway between an "OH" and an "AW") in southwestern Nigeria , for it was the policy of the Baptists from the beginning to emphasize the training of Nigerian Christians as school teachers, nurses and church leaders.

Many people do not realize that most missionaries (of all denominations) spend very little time preaching, either from the pulpit or from the shade of the mango tree. Instead, they spend their time establishing schools, seminaries and teaching hospitals. The direct ministry and service to the Africans is thus carried out by the Africans themselves, and eventually the Africans themselves also take over the teacher training colleges, the seminaries, publishing houses and hospitals.

Carrol taught Greek, Hebrew and Old Testament theology at the seminary in Ogbomosho .

Carrol was a very practical man with a mechanical bent. Further, he had worked in a printshop as a teenager. Thus he was soon appointed to head up the fledgling Nigerian Baptist Press in 1947. He established and slowly built up a very organized and efficient publishing house, of course training the African staff to eventually take over as he went along. It wasn't easy. One giant printing press arrived from America in 14 separate crates -- without one word of assembly instructions. Fortunately, there was a single photograph of the assembled machine and that was (barely) enough to get the thing assembled and operational.