Lee Compere and his wife were British missionaries in Jamaica before the climate drove them out and up to Charleston, S.C., where they met Richard Furman. After some time in the Carolinas they moved to Alabama to work among the Creek Indians. It was there that their ninth child, Ebenezer Lee Compere, E.L., was born. Eventually the Lord saved the child, and he became a member of the Montaches Creek Baptist Church in Mississippi. After graduating from Mercer University, he visited his brother in Arkansas. When he saw the spiritual condition of the people in western Arkansas and the opportunities for ministry in the Indian Territory, he entered into a work in Fort Smith, without any support but the Lord Himself. He spent half of his time in Fort Smith and the other half working among the Cherokee Indians in what became known as Oklahoma. When the Civil War disrupted his western ministry, he returned to Mississippi preaching the gospel and where he met and married Josephine Mullins. After the war, as he and his wife were moving to Arkansas, they stopped in Memphis, Tennessee, because they didn’t travel on Sundays. Attending church there E.L. met an old friend, Martin Sumner, who promised the couple that he would send them $500 per year to support them in their work. It was all they needed to prove that they were definitely in the Lord’s will. They labored together for thirty years among both the Cherokees and the whites. Along with another missionary, E.L. helped to establish Buckner College, strengthening and blessing dozens of churches. The ecclesiastical children and grandchildren of those Indian churches still exist today.
In September 1895, E.L. Compere became ill. He was bed-ridden until his home-going on this day in that year, 1895.
