this institution
she enjoyed a year's training in the Bible school connected with Moody's
Chicago Avenue church, Chicago.

During the next year, after hearing in her home town an appeal in behalf
of a Negro school in the south, she was led to offer her services to the
Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen. In December 1885, she
received a commission with request to locate among the Choctaw Freedmen
at Lukfata, in the southeast part of Indian Territory. The route at that
early date was quite circuitous. Going south through Kansas City over
the M. K. T. Ry., to Denison, Texas, she passed eastward by rail to
Bells, through Paris to Clarksville, Texas; and thence northward forty
miles to Wheelock and Lukfata. Clarksville, south of Red river continued
to be the nearest town and station during the next ten years.

She has now completed twenty-eight years of continuous and faithful
service as a missionary teacher among the Freedmen. During these years
she has served the following communities and churches.

Lukfata, Mount Gilead 11 years 1885-1896.
Fowlerville, Forest 3 years 1896-1899.
Goodland, Hebron 1 year 1899-1900.
Grant, Beaver Dam 4 years 1900-1904.
Valliant, Oak Hill Academy 6-1/2 years 1904-1911.
Beaver Dam 1 year 1911-1912.
Wynnewood, Bethesda Mission 2 years 1912-1914.

She is now serving as principal teacher in the Bethesda Home and School,
located three miles northeast of Wynnewood in the Chickasaw Nation. This
school was opened Nov. 1, 1899. It was founded by Carrie and Clara Boles
and others; and its object is to provide a home and christian education
to the orphan and homeless youth of the colored people.

Miss Ahrens has been a life long and conscientious Christian worker,
among the Freedmen of the Choctaw Nation. Her name is a household word
to all of them. She found it necessary from the first to locate as a
lonely teacher among them in territorial days, and share with them the
unusual privations, incident to a life of such seclusion and unselfish
devotion. During the first fifteen years, she had to live alone in
little, rudely constructed huts in a sparsely settled timber country,
where quarrels and murders, among both the Indians and colored people,
were events of common and almost annual occurrence; yet she never
thought of leaving her work or forsaking her mission on a