LEST WE FORGET The Lees   

THE LEES and THE DARJEELING DISASTER of 1899

   On 24 September 1899, six children of the Lee family: Vida Maud, Wilbur David, Ada Eunice, Esther Dennett, Lois Gertrude, and Herbert Wilson, who were studying at Arcadia Girls’ School  in Darjeeling, were swept away to death in one single landslide.

   Wilbur was the only one who lived to tell his parents of their last moments, but he too died within a few days of the disaster. Along with the six, claimed by the landslide was also Jessudar, a Bengali girl who had become part of the family.

   The school had its premises in a building known as Arcadia where Miss Emma Knowles served as the first principal. The school (founded on March 11, 1895, with 13 students), which was later renamed Queen’s Hill School and finally Mt. Hermon School, was 

regarded as a branch of the Calcutta Girls' High School.

   After the tragic death of their six children, their parents, David Hiram Lee and Ada Hildergarde Jones with the help of generous donors founded the Lee Memorial Mission School in Calcutta.

Mt. Hermon and the Hermonites will always remember the Lee family with love and gratitude even as the school celebrates its 125th anniversary in 2020.

“The school was established in 1895 under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church of America. Its founder and first Principal was Miss Emma Knowles, a missionary sent out to India with the Women's Foreign Missionary Society in 1881. Emma Knowles played a key role in establishing the Wellesley Girls High School in Nainital and having worked at the Calcutta Girls' High School she embarked on a similar school to be set up in Darjeeling's cool climate.

Her plan gained the approval of the Church authorities in the United States as well as in India, but no financial aid was forthcoming from either quarter. It was only by borrowing and by paying rent out of her missionary salary that she was able to open her school in 1895 in a rented house called Arcadia, in a long low building right in the heart of the town, with just 13 pupils on the rolls. The school was also called Arcadia at that time and was considered as a branch of the Calcutta Girls’ High School.

By 1899 there were 37 boarders when Miss C. J. Stahl was the officiating Principal for Miss Knowles. On a late September evening, following a deluge from continuous rains, "the ledge in front of the school became a river of water." The children were evacuated to a home higher up. Some little ones had already fallen asleep in their new refuge when a great boulder hit the corner of the room destroying the two walls. The two children just moved to a place of safety were killed, all others went unhurt.

On the same night in a cottage not far from Arcadia, 6 children of Mr and Mrs Lee were living in the care of their older sister and trusted servants. They attended Arcadia as day scholars. The next morning revealed that there was not a vestige of the cottage or anything it held. Mrs Ada Lee turned to God and wrote of her journey in pain in her book, The Darjeeling Disaster. It chronicles her struggles and her faith in converting her disaster to triumph. Out of this heart-wrenching engagement with God the Lee Memorial Mission was born to care for famine-stricken orphans, by providing for sthem food, education and a decent place to stay. Thus in Wellington Square, the Lee Memorial Building came into being in 1908, "In Answer to Prayer – Psalm 27: 1".

In the disaster of 1899 ten students had died. Following the disaster Arcadia was closed and opened again on 1 March 1900 in two rented houses named Queen's Hill and The Repose, which were later purchased with a third house, Woodville, on ground leased from the Maharaja of Burdwan. These premises were above the railway station, and the school officially became Queen's Hill School for Girls. A new wing was added in 1902 with financial aid from the Women's Foreign Missionary Society and building grants from the Government of India.”(Mt. Hermon School website)