The Associated Press

LOUISVILLE - The Rev. Marietta Mansfield, who served as the first female pastor in the former Louisville Conference of the United Methodist Church, has died.

Mansfield died Monday at Jewish Hospital.

Born in 1917 in Warren County, she was ordained as a deacon in India in 1956, where she served as a missionary from 1944 to 1958. There she contracted polio, which paralyzed her for more than eight months. She suffered from post-polio syndrome the rest of her life, which left her muscles weak and made breathing and swallowing difficult, said her niece, Nancy Lage.

After returning to the United States, Mansfield trained in chaplaincy in New Jersey and then earned a master's degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School. She graduated from Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1942 and studied at Hartford (Conn.) Seminary Foundation until she went to India.

In 1961, she was ordained an elder, the highest order of clergy in the Methodist Church, which was the country's largest Protestant denomination at the time. Also that year, she became the first woman pastor in the church's Louisville conference that covered of the western half of Kentucky.

She was pastor of McDowell Chapel Methodist Church in Brooks, First Methodist Church in Cloverport, Glendale United Methodist Church and Walker Memorial Methodist Church in Louisville.

In 1977, she left to become the chaplain at Louisville's Wesley Manor Retirement Community.

Mansfield was also a former president of the American Association of Women Ministers.

Mansfield's funeral will be at 11 a.m. Saturday in Parkview United Methodist Church in Louisville. Burial will be in Cave Hill Cemetery.