Martha Toler Spencer

Missionary and artist Martha Toler Spencer, the youngest of three children, was born in Virginia in 1898. She was educated in public schools and at eh Hartshorn Academy where she met the Reverend John L. Spencer of Huntington, an ordained Baptist minister, whom she later married. At the time of their meeting, Spencer was studying agriculture at Hampton Institute.
In 1925, sponsored by Huntington’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the couple left the United States to work as missionaries in Liberia, Africa. It was during their five years in Liberia that their son, Hohn Henri, was born.
While in Africa, the couple reported that they converted 340 people to Christianity. When they came back to Huntington, Mrs. Spencer became a well-known figure. As the area’s only returned Black female missionary, she spent many hours visiting churches, schools, and clubs, speaking of Africa as a place of dignity and wonder and displaying artifacts that she had brought home with her. She taught the importance of the Arican heritage, as well as arts and crafts to children and adults.
For many years in Huntington, Mrs. Spencer is best remembered for the oil and watercolor paintings which she created and sold. Some of her paintings reflected her days as a missionary. Drawn from memory, they were often of fishing villages, huts and landscapes. In some others, she painted a building used in the slave trade. In later years she worked a great deal in oils and won several blue ribbons at the Kyova Fair, in Huntington.
Martha Spencer died in Newport News, Virginia in 1984.