Nearly a dozen Wofford alumni have become bishops in the Methodist Church, and two of those have the distinction of having served as bishop in another country. One of those, Bishop Cyrus B. Dawsey, was a missionary in Brazil for some 32 years before becoming the bishop of the Methodist Church of Brazil.
Born in Galivants Ferry, SC in 1886, Cyrus Bassett Dawsey grew up in Horry County before finishing his secondary education at the Wofford Fitting School in 1906. He continued on into the college, graduating in 1910. He must have felt the call to ministry early, for he was licensed to preach in 1906, and in 1911, joined the South Carolina Annual Conference. He served the Montgomery Memorial Methodist Church in Pacolet, SC, was ordained deacon in 1913. The Dawsey family had been interested in missionary work, and had considered service in Japan or Cuba, but a visiting preacher at the Spartanburg District Conference in 1913 had presented the case for missionary work in Brazil so strongly that the Spartanburg District agreed to support a family’s work in that country. And so, in 1914, the Dawsey family found themselves en route to Brazil.
Cyrus Dawsey was transferred to the Methodist Church of Brazil, an autonomous church of Methodism, and ordained elder there in 1915. After a year of intensive language study in Piracicaba, the family moved to the interior state of Sao Paulo, where they were pioneer Methodists. While the young minister traveled, almost like one of the Methodist circuit riders in America a century before, Mrs. Dawsey served as teacher, nurse, midwife, and undertaker in the communities where they lived. She organized activities in the churches they served, taught in schools where they existed and created them when they didn’t. Their mud home had clay floors, kerosene lamps, well water, and straw mattresses.
The Rev. Dawsey largely brought the Methodist Church into existence in the northwest of Sao Paulo State. He later served as the district superintendent of that area, and one of the schools he founded grew by the 1960s into a large enterprise. In 1946, the General Conference of the Brazilian Methodist Church elected him to be their bishop, making him only the second American, after South Carolina native John W. Tarboux, to be elected to that post. Bishops in that church served five year terms, not for life, and he was re-elected five years later. The Dawseys moved to Piracicaba, where Mrs. Dawsey died in 1948. Bishop Dawsey retired in 1956.
Four of Bishop Dawsey’s children entered the mission field. Ethel and her husband founded a school of sacred music to teach choir directors. Sarah was the principal of Colegio Bennett, a school in Rio de Janeiro. Agnes and her husband Will Rogers as a minister family in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where they ministered to the country’s cowboys, or gauchos, Cyrus, Jr. and his wife served churches around Sao Paulo State, the area of his birth. Their youngest daughter worked in Columbia, South Carolina’s Bethlehem Center. Many descendants of the Dawsey and Rogers families are still active in missions and in the Methodist ministry in South Carolina.
Upon his retirement after 42 years of service in Brazil, Cyrus B. Dawsey and his second wife, missionary Lillian Knobles Dawsey, retired to Columbia, and the South Carolina Conference elected him as an honorary member. He remained in Columbia until his death in 1976.