On 22nd February 1910, at the Cathedral Church of the Resurrection in Lahore, Bishop George Alfred Lefroy (1854-1922) inaugurated the Brotherhood of the Imitation of Jesus. Reverend Samuel Stokes (1882-1946), an American missionary, became the provisional Minister-General of this Franciscan Brotherhood. Reverend Frederick Western (1880-1951) of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and Reverend C. F. Andrews (1871-1940) possessed loose personal associations with the Brotherhood. Its intent embraced service to the sick and education for the young.
The Brotherhood was located at Kotgarh in Punjab. It had ties with the Church Missionary Society and the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States. The Brotherhood collapsed in 1912 when Stokes left it to marry an Indian woman; the later phase of Chritistian religious and missionary activities started to take on a dramatic turn their on.
Kotgarh valley is famous for its world class quality apples. The apple cultivation of the place was initiated by Satyanand Stokes who was an American missionary.
Samuel Evans Stokes, an American Missionary landed in Kotgarh in 1904 as a young man of 22 to spread the message of Christ and also with the objective of helping the hill people. He worked at the leper home in the Shimla hills of Himachal Pradesh for two years. Then becoming disillusioned with the missionary way of life, he severed links with missionary organisations and became a sort of a hermit, giving up all material comforts and living for some time in a cave.
Samuel Evans Stokes was involved with the spreading of Christianity however the beauty and the culture of Kotgarh had an effect on him and he converted to Hinduism and took a Hindu name Satyanand Stokes and made Barobag his abode. He found the climate and soil conclusive to apple cultivation (the apple production was at its peak in America) and in 1919 he planted trees on his 200 acres and they began bearing apples in 1925.The natives took to growing apples soon and today it has spread all over the Shimla hills. The Apple boom in Kotgarh improved the economy of the place.
He is the only American to have served in the All-India Congress Committee of the Indian National Congress. He passed away on 14 May 1946, having spent more than 43 years of his life in the country which he had come to change but which changed him instead.
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