The school Sanderson took over had been operating under various names and in various locations for nearly seven decades. It began in September 1851 in Hong Kong, when the wife of American Baptist missionary Mr. Johnson opened a boarding school for Swatow-area girls in the lower rooms of her dwelling house. The mission relocated to Swatow in 1860 and the school moved with it, first to Double Island and then to Kakchieh; Mrs. Johnson ran it until her husband’s death in 1872. Mrs. Henrietta Partridge restarted the work in 1874 with five pupils in a small valley house on the Kakchieh compound, and by 1876 there were twelve girls in a new building. The school took its formal name in this period, when an American family endowed a building in memory of Abigail Hart Scott, mother of one of the school’s benefactresses. Miss Weld, the first single young woman the Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society sent out specifically for the school work, raised it from a primary school to a high school during her five-year tenure beginning in 1906; by 1911 there were eighty-one girls enrolled. Miss Mabelle Culley took over in 1911 and ran the school until her 1920 furlough, when she handed it to Sanderson. Of all the women who held the school across its first century, Sanderson held it the longest.
