Francis Dunlap Gamewell b. Aug 31, , Camden, South Carolina ; d. He was the Chief of the Fortifications Committee in the Siege of the Legations during the Boxer Rebellion in and was acclaimed as one of the heroes of the siege. Frank Gamewell was the son of an inventor and he inherited the aptitude of his father for tinkering and building. Gamewell aspired to become a civil engineer and studied at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell University.
Due to illness he was unable to complete his studies, but instead attained a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Dickinson College. Porter, also a Methodist missionary. He was The couple never had any children. The Gamewell's and other missionaries finally escaped, returned to the China coast, and subsequently the United States.
In the couple returned to Beijing and Gamewell became a physics professor at Yenching University. Over the next several years he supervised construction of churches and other buildings on the Methodist compound, the largest of the Protestant missionary compounds in Beijing [5]. In early an anti-foreign, anti-Christian peasant movement spread northward from Shandong Province taking over control of much of the countryside, burning churches and killing Chinese Christians.
The Boxers, as the participants in the movement were called, had substantial support within the Qing dynasty government and from the Empress Dowager Cixi in Beijing. The Gamewells were planning to leave Beijing by train on June 5, en route to a furlough in the United States. But the train did not arrive that day or on subsequent days. The Boxers had cut the railroad line to the port of Tianjin. Conditions inside the walls of the city itself became increasingly unsafe for foreigners as Boxers entered the city and menaced foreign establishments.
On June 8, all the Protestant American missionaries in Beijing decided to gather in the Methodist compound at which Gamewell was the senior missionary. The Methodist compound was the largest and most defensible of the missionary establishments. It was also near the Legation Quarter where several hundred foreign diplomats and businessmen lived and worked. The period between June 8 and June 20 is called the "semi-siege" as foreigners in Peking came increasingly under attack by the Boxers.
