Joseph Clemens

Joseph Clemens (9 December 1862 – 21 January 1936) was an American Methodist Episcopalian chaplain, missionary and plant collector who served and worked in South East Asia and elsewhere.

Among his courses of study were Dutch, German, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as Physics, Chemistry, Analytical Geometry, Political Economics, English Literature and Psychology.

He also played checkers, wrote letters to friends, acquaintances, family, church, and, of course, to his fiancé, Mary Knapp Strong of Muncy County, and studied.

He spent five months lecturing in Pennsylvania in small towns, factories, schools and churches and with the money he earned, he made an endowment to Dickinson College to support its missions.

In 1915, while living in a mission camp and continuing to preach to the natives, Joseph and Mary made their first study together at Mount Kinabalu in North Borneo.

Meanwhile, he maintained contacts with his limestone alma mater half a world away, writing a letter to the college in 1935 that became an article in the Dickinson Alumnus.

Clemens died on 21 January 1936, some weeks after his seventy-third birthday, in New Guinea from food poisoning contracted from eating contaminated wild boar meat.

The couple had never had any children, and Mary spent the rest of her life, from the outbreak of war in the Pacific when she was evacuated from New Guinea, in Australia, most of it working at the Queensland Herbarium.

Joseph Clemens was one of many from the Dickinson family who traveled abroad spreading the knowledge gained within the old gray walls to the farthest points in the world.

During most of the early years of the college, the vast majority of these students were Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries who sought to spread western ideas to the "less fortunate."