March 1893 – January 1987

by Ellen C Weig, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wilmington, NC, 2016

The training to be a deaconess, director of education, or a parish worker at the Church Training and Deaconess House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, took two to three years of rigorous study and included courses on the Bible and Church history, nurse’s training, and practical skills training in sewing, home economics, running meetings, parish visiting and public relations.[1] Anna Louise Robertson entered the school in 1917, graduated in 1919, and came to North Carolina to be a parish and community worker.

Anna, born in Kentucky, was the daughter of Lloyd and Alberta Dodge Robertson. We don’t know what prompted her to train as a Deaconess - we do know that she began her life’s work, primarily as an educator, at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1920 by establishing the parochial kindergarten and as Director of Education. The next year she went to Fayetteville, North Carolina, to serve as Deaconess and community worker for the Tolar-Hart Mills for three years.[2] While there she wrote the “mystery play” entitled “Lady Catechism.”

In 1924 Anna returned to Good Shepherd in Wilmington. By the next year she had revived the parochial kindergarten. She served Good Shepherd as a parish worker, continued to write plays in which the Woman’s Auxiliary and church school students played parts, and became very involved with the Young People’s Service League (YPLS). For a number of years she was a teacher at Camp Leach, Washington, NC. One of her campers wrote that she taught them “the aims and purposes of the League and how to achieve them” in her YPSL methods class.[3] Her relationship with Good Shepherd’s rector, the Rev. Edward Clark McConnell and his wife, Florence, was clearly a close one. When the McConnell’s baby daughter, Carolyn Ann, was baptized, Anna provided a gift of water for the baptism from the Jordan River, given to her by Deaconess Shaw of the Philippines.[4]

After spending more than fifteen years at Good Shepherd, Anna left Wilmington to take a similar job at Christ Chapel in Kinston, N.C. During the 1930s and 1940s she continued her involvement at Camp Leach and was the Convocation of Wilmington’s counselor and chairman for YPSL. She retired from her work in Kinston in 1951 and returned to Wilmington and Good Shepherd where she continued to do volunteer work. In 1982 she was honored for her service by the people of St. Mary’s, Kinston, at “Anna Louise Robertson Day.”[5] Anna died in Wilmington in 1987 and is buried in the Oakdale Cemetery.

[1] [1] Donovan, Mary Sudman.

[2] [2] The Mission Herald, 1923, November.

[3] [3] “Y.P.S.L.: My Personal Experience” in The Mission Herald. October, 1940. p. 11.

[4] [4] The Mission Herald. 1936, January 2. p. 11

[5] The History of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kinston, North Carolina, 1832-1982 https://archive.org/stream/stmarysepiscopal00kins#page/36/mode/2up/search/Robertson