Archives sometimes wind up with odd items in their collections, and no real explanation of how they wound up there. I was looking through a file of unclassified photos that’s been in the vicinity of my desk for a while today and examined more closely three portraits of men I didn’t recognize. Often we have portraits of Wofford faculty members or students, or Methodist ministers, and sometimes these students or ministers are hard to identify. I’d looked at thse portraits before and had never stopped to try to identify them. But today I decided that I needed to put this question to rest.
And, as it turns out, if I’d looked more closely at the outset, some things would have become obvious. Each had a name written underneath the portrait, but I hadn’t quite been able to make it out. But I noticed a reference to Brazil. And then I realized the picture had a “Sao Paulo” imprint. And then I saw the word “president.” So a little trip over to Wikipedia found a list of Presidents of Brazil, and sure enough, I realized that I have portraits of the first three civilian presidents of Brazil on my desk.
After overthrowing Emperor Dom Pedro II in a military coup in 1888, Brazilians wrote a new constitution and established a republic. The first two presidents were elected by a constituent congress. The third president of Brazil, pictured above, was Prudente de Morais, and he was the first civilian and first directly-elected president. 
He served for four years. His successor, Manuel de Campos Sales, served from 1898 to 1902 as the second civilian president. The third civilian president and fifth president of the republic, Francisco Rodrigues Alves, served from 1902 to 1906.
Now, how did pictures of the first three civilian presidents of Brazil wind up at Wofford? I can’t say for sure, but the folder indicates they are part of the Methodist Conference Historical Society Portrait Collection. Southern Methodists had a number of connections with Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th century. Historians have written elsewhere of the flight of some southerners to Brazil at the end of the Civil War. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888 (which angered the few remaining slaveholders and led to the coup against the emperor!) Still, those connections, and missionary work of Southern Methodists in Brazil forged some strong connections.
One Methodist missionary who served in Brazil, John W. Tarboux, graduated from Wofford in 1877. He and two other ministers formed the Brazil Annual Conference in 1886 – which was apparently the smallest annual conference ever formed in the Methodist Church. For years he was the president of the Granberry Institute, which he hoped to turn into a Methodist university there. 
After he retired in 1921, he moved to Miami, but the organizing General Conference of the autonomous Methodist Church of Brazil in 1930 elected him as their first bishop. Another Wofford alumnus, Cyrus B. Dawsey of the class of 1910, also served as a longtime missionary in Brazil and in 1946 was elected bishop of the Methodist Church in Brazil. I suspect that these pictures may have come as part of a gift of materials from Bishop Tarboux.
Photos, top to bottom: Presidents Morais, Sales, and Alves, from the Methodist Conference Historical Society Collection. Click on each image for a larger version.
