Eliza Wilcox Merrill (1800-1881) and Moses P. Merrill (1803-1840)

The first missionaries to come to Nebraska were Rev. Moses P. Merrill and his wife, Eliza Wilcox Merrill, Baptist missionaries, who came in 1833 to Bellevue and established a school for the Oto Indians. Merrill, born and educated in Maine, was a school teacher before becoming a missionary-preacher. Merrill and Eliza Wilcox were married in 1830 and served together as missionaries in Michigan and at the Shawnee Mission in Missouri.

Their continued interest in missions to the Indians then led them to open the Oto mission school at Bellevue. From 1835 to 1840 they lived in the newly relocated Oto village eight miles southwest of Bellevue. In these two locations, the Merrills taught and ministered to the Oto. They learned the Oto language and prepared spelling and reading books and as well as a hymn book in the Oto language.

In 1838 Merrill accompanied the Oto on a buffalo hunt and afterwards his health declined and he died from tuberculosis on February 6, 1840.

Eliza Merrill was one of the first white women to reside in Nebraska. One week after the Merrills arrived in Bellevue, she opened a school for the Oto. The Merrills' son, born in 1835 at Bellevue shortly before they moved to the new village, was the second white child born in Nebraska. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Merrill moved to the East with her son, settling in New York. Here she later established the Albany Orphanage. She
died in 1881.