Lottie Moon

Charlotte "Lottie" Digges Moon (1840-1912) became a famous Baptist missionary to North China and spent nearly forty years in China. She died of severe malnutrition on Christmas Eve, 1912, after sharing her meager money and food with the starving Chinese people around her mission. She endured the hardship of starvation, plague, the turmoil of the end of the Qing dynasty, the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Nationalist Rebellion to become one of the first female missionaries of the 19th Century. There is a historical marker at Viewmont stating that this plantation was her birthplace.

The daughter of a wealthy and cultured family of Albemarle County, she and her seven siblings lived at Viewmont, built by Joshua Fry, a friend of United States President George Washington. She attended Albemarle Female Institute, the female counterpart to the all male University of Virginia. (Until the 1890s UVA students were all male, and until 1950 all were white. In 1970, the first class of undergraduate women entered UVA.)

Lottie's younger sister, Edmonia, also served as as a missionary to China; after about five years, she return to Viewmont due to illness.

Lottie's oldest sister, Oriana, became a physician and served at the Confederate Army's General Hospital in Charlottesville during the Civil War. Oriana Moon Andrews and her husband, Dr. John S. Andrews, operated a hospital at Old Hall in Scottsville from 1882-1883.

Lottie died on December 24, 1912 Kobe, Hyōgo, Japan (aged 72).

Started in 1918, the "Lottie Moon Christmas Offering" is an annual offering collected by Southern Baptists to support international missions. On March 31, 2021, the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering surpassed $5 billion total gifts since collection to send missionaries to China began in 1888.