July 9, 1896

Cameron Townsend was born in a one-room farmhouse in Eastvale, California, the first son and fifth child in a tenant farm family. He had one younger brother. In June 1934, Townsend, along with Leonard Livingston Legters, founded a linguistic training program for the purpose of promoting Bible translation among minority language groups. Named Camp Wycliffe in honor of John Wycliffe—the first scholar to translate the entire Bible into English—the program was based in an old abandoned farmhouse near Sulphur Springs (Benton County). Camp Wycliffe would later become Wycliffe Bible Translators, the founding of which, as historian Mark Noll argued, “may stand symbolically for one of the great Christian events of the age.”