Reverend Ola Hanson papers, A1077

Ola Hanson was born in Ahus, Kristianstad, Sweden on June 25, 1864. He came to Colgate from Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from the seminary in 1890.

Hanson studied at Swedish Theological Seminaries in St. Paul, Minnesota and Stromsburg, Nebraska and was ordained in Minneapolis on June 23, 1890. He was a missionary to Kachins, Bhamo Burma with the American Baptist Missionary Union/American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society from 1890 until his death in St. Paul on October 17,1929, during which time he wrote and translated a number of works in the Kachin language. Hanson was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature from Colgate in 1909 and the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal in 1929.

Elmer William Smith, ed. Colgate University General Catalogue, vol. 2, (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University, 1939), 526.

The guide states that the Kachin language is spoken "in Northern Burma, western Yunnan, eastern Assam, and in borders of Tibet."

Some of Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution's earliest students were missionaries in this area, and student and faculty interest in missions continued throughout the nineteenth century.

Howard Williams, A History of Colgate, 1819-1869 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969), 46, 52-56 http://cu-cel.org/cuhist/.