Heroic Livingston County woman risked her life to save sex slaves in Chinatown
In late July 1897, an ailing Margaret Culbertson left the Occidental Mission Home in San Francisco that she ran for 20 years — the place where she helped rescue some of the most vulnerable young women in the city.
Carried on a stretcher, she was taken to a train on which she would begin her long ride home to Groveland, south of Rochester in Livingston County. It was there that she hoped to regain her health so she could once again save lives and souls.
The Chinese girls and young women Culbertson had rescued from sex slavery cried as she departed.
They were fearful that they would never see her again, Julia Flynn Siler writes in The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, her remarkable, recently published book.
Their fears were realized. Culbertson made it across the country, but she died in Avon, about 10 miles from her destination. She was 62 or 63 years old.
Thus ended a life of astonishing bravery, powered by a faith that was forged in a Presbyterian church in Groveland. Culbertson risked her own safety again and again a continent away.
“Miss Culbertson died a martyr to the cause which had absorbed the labors of her lifetime,” wrote the San Francisco Call at the time of her death.
The immediate cause of Culbertson’s death were the aftereffects of a kick she had received from a girl in her charge who had turned violent. But it also was true she was worn down from fighting on behalf of the young girls and women she rescued from horrible circumstances.
Raised in Groveland, Culbertson had gone to San Francisco to work as a governess for a family there.
In 1877, she became the superintendent of the Occidental Mission Home. Founded by Presbyterian women, the home was a haven for immigrant Chinese girls and women who had been brought into the country under false pretenses by the men of the city’s Chinatown. (After 1882 and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the women were most often smuggled into the country.)
Prostitution at the time was legal; slavery was not. But by Siler’s description, local authorities either couldn’t — or didn’t always want to — stop the practice of slavery.
“A decade after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished the slavery of African Americans, this ‘other slavery’ — the trafficking of young Asian women — was flourishing in San Francisco and throughout the West,” Siler writes in her book, which tells the stories surrounding the mission home and the people behind it with remarkable detail and depth.
As superintendent of the mission home, Culbertson would venture into Chinatown and rescue young women. Or she would open her door and take the fleeing women in. (And, for sure, they weren’t always women, as some were girls not yet into their teens.)
But, inevitably it seemed, the men would come after their slaves. They would physically threaten Culbertson. They would take her to court.
An 1889 account in the San Francisco Examiner of one court appearance depicted a chaotic scene. Culbertson, along with a lawyer, an interpreter and a young Chinese woman, Fung Ping, were there to resist a motion by a man who said Ping was his wife and should be returned to him.
“Miss Culbertson expressed apprehensions that the girl would be taken by force,” the Examiner reported. Those apprehensions were well-founded. After a ruling on the case was postponed, Culbertson and the interpreter had to physically shield Fung Ping as they took her by a shouting mob.
Hundreds of young women were rescued while Culbertson was superintendent of the home. Her work was carried on by her assistant, Donaldina Cameron, after she left. (The home is now known as Cameron House and has evolved into a family services agency.)
Margaret Culbertson was accompanied on that last train ride home by her sister Matilda and by her niece Anna Culbertson, who worked as her assistant at the mission home.
A Democrat and Chronicle article said, “When the train reached Avon last Saturday, (Culbertson) had failed so rapidly that she was removed to the sanitarium and there soon after, not yet home but beneath the sky and amid the scenery of her own loved Genesee valley, death came.”
I’m grateful to Mark Liu of the Democrat and Chronicle who called my attention to The White Devil’s Daughters and to Amie Alden, Livingston County’s historian, for her help in tracking down Margaret Culbertson’s Groveland connections.
On Remarkable Rochester
Retired Senior Editor Jim Memmott reflects on what makes Rochester distinctively Rochester, its history, its habits, its people. Since 2010, he has also been compiling a list of Remarkable Rochesterians. Contact him at: (585) 278-8012 or JMEMMOTT@DemocratandChronicle.com or Remarkable Rochester, Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454.
Let’s add the name of this advocate for young women to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at rochester.nydatabases.com:
Margaret Culbertson (1834-1897): For nearly 20 years, she resisted threats of physical attack and court actions as the superintendent of the Occidental Mission Home in San Francisco, saving hundreds of immigrant girls and young women who, most often, had been smuggled into California from China and held in slavery, forced to work as prostitutes and made to suffer other abuse. Raised in Groveland, Livingston County, and a member of the Presbyterian church there, she was coming home for a period of rest and recovery when she died in Avon, Livingston County. Newspapers eulogized her as a hero, a woman who never knew fear.