{"id":381,"date":"2026-04-12T21:16:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T21:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/?post_type=exhibit&p=381"},"modified":"2026-05-09T02:59:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T02:59:45","slug":"abbie-g-sanderson-1914","status":"publish","type":"exhibit","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/exhibits\/abbie-g-sanderson-1914\/","title":{"rendered":"Abbie G. Sanderson ‘1914"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Welcome to Seven Homes, a digital biography of Abbie Gertrude Sanderson, Colby Class of 1914. Born in a Baptist parsonage in Greenville, New Hampshire in 1893 and buried in South Berwick, Maine in 1970, Sanderson spent the seventy-seven years between in some of the most consequential places American Baptists worked overseas in the twentieth century. She taught at the Abigail Hart Scott Memorial Girls’ School at Kakchieh, across the bay from Swatow, China, for thirty-three years, was detained by the Chinese Communists for twenty-one months, and finished her career at Shokei Gakuin in Sendai, Japan. The seven homes named in this title reflects the many places where she lived and worked: Greenville, Waterville, Houlton, Kakchieh, the detention cell, Sendai, and South Berwick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


This site was developed for Colby’s EA\/HI 333: Colby and China, which traces the lives of Colby alumni who lived and worked in twentieth-century China. The story it tells is not the heroic missionary biography of an earlier era but a more contingent one: a young woman who entered a struggling girls’ school where no one else was available to take charge, who built it into a stable institution over three decades, and whose life broke cleanly around twenty-one months in a Communist prison cell. The sections that follow trace her life in eight chapters from her New Hampshire beginnings through her late retirement in Maine, with her own letters, her published writings, archival photographs, and the institutional records of the schools and missionary societies that shaped her work. Across the seven homes that followed, Sanderson always expressed dedication, resilience, and thoughtfulness. The girl her roommate teased as “busy” in 1914 became the woman who weathered a typhoon, a world war, and twenty-one months in a Communist prison cell, and who was remembered by her students long after she had left them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across her seven homes, Sanderson showed the same dedication, resilience, and thoughtfulness. The girl her roommate teased as “busy” in 1914 became the woman who weathered a typhoon, survived twenty-one months in a Communist prison cell, and cared for hundreds of students who remembered her long after she had left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to Seven Homes, a digital biography of Abbie Gertrude Sanderson, Colby Class of 1914. Born in a Baptist parsonage in Greenville, New Hampshire in 1893 and buried in South Berwick, Maine in 1970, Sanderson spent the seventy-seven years between in some of the most consequential places American Baptists worked overseas in the twentieth century. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","institution":[7],"place":[17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibit\/381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibit"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibit"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibit\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3122,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibit\/381\/revisions\/3122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"institution","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/institution?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"place","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colby-and-china-ea333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/place?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}