Another look at Christian freedom. By the late twentieth century, the Methodist University in Piracicaba had an enrollment of over 10,000 students and was reputed to be one of the best private universities in South America. The school was founded on September 11, 1881, by a missionary from Louisville, Kentucky, Martha Watts, who based her work on the Christian belief that God created us all equal, in his image. And he created us to be free.

Watts began with one room and one student. Her student was a woman, Flora Maria, who was a slave owned by Pedro Blumer and his wife Izabel. Slavery was only abolished in Brazil, May 13, 1888. On November 25, 1881, Martha Watts bought Flora from the Blumers and granted her freedom. The manumission was negotiated in the presence of Prudente Jose de Moraes Barros, a patron of the little school and later chosen as the first civilian President of Brazil. (For the historians among us, the liberation document and proceedings are recorded in the Piracicaba second “Cartorio de Notas local,” book 33, page 45.)

After freed, Flora worked for wages at the little school, for eleven years being custodian and head of kitchen for the “Colegio Piracicabano.” The school opened as a boarding, all female institution. Soon the school grew to a few dozen students and several teachers. Flora was loved and respected by all. At night she would gather the young girls around the stove, serve them hot chocolate and cookies, and tell them stories of her slave days on the sugar cane plantation. She had been born in 1833 about fifty miles south of Piracicaba on the fazenda of Matias Dias de Toledo, uncle of the Baroness of Porto Feliz.

Flora Maria learned English by listening and talking to Watts and the other American missionaries who soon came to Piracicaba. She joined the Methodist Church in January of 1883 and that same year accompanied the Reverend William Koger and family on a trip to the United States. The Koger couple, originally from South Carolina, founded the Methodist Church in Piracicaba. William Koger contracted Yellow Fever and died in 1886.

Flora remained a faithful Christian and Methodist until she died of edema, or what in those years people called dropsy, at the age of 59–July 22, 1892. During Flora’s illness, Martha Watts was constantly at her bedside. Upon Flora Maria’s death, she wrote: “Aunt Flora, after lengthy suffering, entered to her rest. She wanted to go and showed during all of her infirmity her faith in Jesus. She died full of peace and spiritual comfort.”

James M. Dawsey, drawing on the recollections of Cyrus Dawsey