Viette Isabel Brown was born on February 12, 1846 in Newark, Wayne County, New York. She was the third of Hiram Leicester Brown and Hester Ann Bonker's ten children. She attended public school in Newark and then in Shortsville, New York. After graduating from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1871 she taught school in Red Creek, New York; Muncie, Pennsylvania; and Emory, Ohio. In 1893 she went to China and married Reverend William P. Sprague in Tientsin. The Spragues then went to Kalgan in northern China to work at a missionary there. On June 11 in 1900 the Boxer Uprising forced them to flee the mission with a group of nineteen people including other American and Swedish missionaries and children. The group reached Urga, the capital of Mongolia, and then had to move on to Siberia, Moscow and finally St. Petersburg on September 18. The Spragues returned to New York for one furlough and then went back to Kalgan in 1902, staying there until 1910. William Sprague died in 1919 and Viette Brown Sprague spent the rest of her life in Shortsville, New York remaining involved in church activities, missionary organizations and choir. She died on November 2, 1923 at the age of seventy-seven.