Otis Gibson Explained

Honorific Prefix:The Reverend
Otis Gibson
Birth Date:8 December 1826
Birth Place:Moira, New York
Death Place:San Francisco, California
Spouse:Eliza Chamberlain
Children:3

Otis Gibson (; Pinyin: Jīshùn; Foochow Romanized: Gĭ-sông; December 8, 1826 – January 25, 1889) was a Methodist pastor, best known for his missionary work to the Chinese in Fuzhou, China and in San Francisco, California.

Life

Early life

Born on a farm in Moira, New York, Otis Gibson had five brothers and one sister. He was converted at the age of 13 after the sudden death of his brother. When he was 19, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the early 1850s he attended Dickinson College. Later he became a teacher and went to a Quaker settlement in Maryland to teach, where he met his wife-to-be Eliza Chamberlain.[1]

Shortly before he graduated from college, Otis Gibson decided to go into the ministry and was appointed as a missionary to Fuzhou. He graduated in June 1854 with a D.D. and was licensed to preach on 4 November the same year. A few months before he and Eliza were sent to China, they got married in a Methodist Camp Meeting.[1]

Missionary work in China

Otis Gibson's ordination was given in 1854, but his scheduled sail had to be postponed till spring the next year because the recording secretary forgot to record the recommendation. On April 3, 1855 Gibson and wife set sail from New York Harbor on a clipper ship bound for Shanghai. On that day Gibson wrote, "Believing that God ordered our course, we feel content and satisfied that all is for the best."[1] Finally they reached Fuzhou on August 13, 1855,[2] following Gibson's teacher Erastus Wentworth with whom he got acquainted at Dickinson College.

In 1856, Otis Gibson and his Methodist co-laborers established two churches in the city, namely, and Church of Heavenly Peace, which were the first two Methodist churches built in East Asia. On December 26, 1856, Gibson purchased a place in the South bank of River Min and established there in 1859 a commodious wooden Western-style boarding school for laymen and ministers.[3] In the 1860s Gibson also helped in the translation work of the Bible and other Christian books into the local Fuzhou dialect.[2] [4] [5]

On June 14, 1857, Otis Gibson and Robert S. Maclay baptized their first convert, a native tradesman named Ting Ang (Chinese: 陈安).[5] Some weeks later he and Maclay made an unannounced visit to Ting Ang's house and found no sign of idols.[2]

During his tenure in China, Gibson also started the Methodist mission in Yanping (part of Nanping) in 1864. There Gibson succeeded in renting a small house for use as a chapel, but he was faced with strong opposition. Soon afterwards, he went back with Eliza to the United States, and his work in Yanping was continued by Nathan Sites and other Methodist missionaries.[2]

Life back in America

Due to his wife Eliza's failing health, Otis Gibson left China with her in 1865 and returned to Moira, New York as a pastor.[6] In 1868 he was assigned to San Francisco, California as superintendent of the Methodist Church's "Chinese Domestic Mission" designed to minister to the swelling number of Chinese immigrants in area of the California Conference.[7] There he learned the Cantonese dialect and opened many missions and churches, including San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Salinas, and in the gold fields in the foothills of California, and he also wrote a Chinese-English Dictionary and translated the New Testament into Cantonese.[1] Gibson and his wife had instituted on August 10, 1870 the Women's Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast, enlisting area Methodist women to organize the rescue and protection of exploited Chinese women of the slave trade.[7] By the end of 1870, Rev. Gibson had erected the building of the "Chinese Mission Institute" on Washington Street in San Francisco's Chinatown.[8] In October 1871, Gibson baptized his first convert in America, a young Chinese prostitute named Jin Ho.[1] [9] [10] [11]

In his later life, Otis Gibson made untiring and courageous efforts in behalf of the poor and the wronged of the Chinese on the Pacific Coast.[12] In his landmark work The Chinese in America (唐人在金山,) which was published in 1877, Gibson concluded his polemic against the anti-Chinese arguments with a noble restatement of the American ideal:

Otis Gibson was strongly anti-Catholic.[13]

While attending a preachers meeting in 1884 Gibson was stricken with paralysis. He died in San Francisco after a long illness on January 25, 1889, at the home of his son.[1] His funeral service was attended by Chinese, Japanese, and American friends, and he was buried at the Odd Fellows cemetery.[14]

Family life

Otis Gibson and Eliza had two sons while in China. One died in infancy.[1] The other son, William F. Gibson, became an attorney; represented in 1885 a Chinese couple in San Francisco who filed a landmark lawsuit against the school superintendent for barring their American-born daughter from attending public school;[15] and died in 1902 at age 46.[16] Only daughter was Myra Alice Gibson.[17]

Legacy

Otis Gibson started in 1868 the first Methodist ministry to the Chinese in America with a mission in San Francisco. The great 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed Gibson's Washington Street building that housed the Chinese Mission, along with most of San Francisco Chinatown. In 1911, after five years of displacement and fund raising,[18] the Chinese Methodist Church was rebuilt on the corner of Washington and Stockton Streets.[19]

Otis Gibson was also the first pastor to the Japanese on the Pacific coast. When the first Japanese church in America was dedicated in San Francisco in 1894, he was memorialized in the west window stain glass of the Japanese Church on Pine Street.[20]

See also

Notes and References

  1. Otis Gibson's family letters
  2. Carlson, Ellsworth C. (1974), The Foochow Missionaries 1847-1880
  3. Web site: http://www.173591.com/Article/FuZhou/info-7492.html . zh:近代福州基督教建筑文化初探 . 16 August 2009 . zh . https://web.archive.org/web/20120226154854/http://www.173591.com/Article/FuZhou/info-7492.html . 26 February 2012 . dead .
  4. Web site: 仓山区志 (Cangshan District Records). 16 August 2009 . zh.
  5. Web site: http://xpmc.cn/memtcy.htm. zh:卫理公会来华宣教年表. 16 August 2009. zh. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20110707051846/http://xpmc.cn/memtcy.htm. 7 July 2011.
  6. [Edward Thomson (bishop)|Thomson, Edward]
  7. Web site: Otis Gibson (1826 - 1889). 16 August 2009. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20081121180708/http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/g/ed_gibsonO.htm. 21 November 2008.
  8. Web site: Chinese Mission Institute. . cdnc.ucr.edu . Daily Alta California, Volume 22, Number 7550, 22 November 1870 . 22 October 2022 . The building of the Chinese Mission Institute of the Methodist Episcopal Church, under the management of the Rev. O. Gibson, is ... located on Washington street, between Powell and Stockton. The building, which is a three-story frame, is plain, substantial, and ample for the purposes for which it is intended. This institution, springing up quietly and unostentatiously in this city, in spite of the strong and bitter prejudices against the Chinese, created by certain political demagogues, is a credit to our city, to civilization, and to the church under whose auspices it is being reared..
  9. Web site: The Early Chinese Pioneers . 16 August 2009 . https://web.archive.org/web/20090828001323/http://www.gbgm-umc.org/awrc/html/hist-begin.htm . 28 August 2009 . dead .
  10. Yung, Judy (1995), Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco
  11. Staley, Jeffrey L. (July 2008), "Clothed and in Her Right Mind": Mark 5:1-20 and Postcolonial Discourse
  12. Johnston, Nathan Robinson (1898), Looking Back from the Sunset Land (People worth Knowing)
  13. Daniels, Roger (1990): Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850
  14. Web site: IMPRESSIVE SERVICES. All Classes Attend the Funeral of Rev. Otis Gibson . cdnc.ucr.edu . Daily Alta California, Volume LXXX, Number 29, 29 January 1889 . 2 November 2022.
  15. Book: Paddison . Joshua . American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California . 2012 . University of California Press . Berkeley, California . 9780520289055 . 179-180 .
  16. Web site: DIED. Gibson, William F. . cdnc.ucr.edu . San Francisco Call, Volume 87, Number 116, 26 March 1902 . 2 November 2022 . In this city, March 25, 1902, William F. Gibson, beloved husband of Carolina S. Gibson, son of Mrs. E. C. Gibson and the late Rev. Otis Gibson, D.D., and brother of Mrs. G. H. Martin, aged 46 years. ...funeral tomorrow ... from his late residence, 912 Dolores street, between Twenty-second and Twenty-third..
  17. Web site: MARRIED. MARTIN-GIBSON. . cdnc.ucr.edu . Daily Alta California, Volume 84, Number 7, 7 January 1891 . 2 November 2022 . In this city, January 5, by the Rev. H. B. Heacock: George Handel Martin of Port Costa and Myra Alice Gibson, only daughter of Otis Gibson, D. D..
  18. Web site: ORIENTAL MISSION WORK TO BENEFIT . cdnc.ucr.edu . San Francisco Call, Volume 105, Number 177, 26 May 1909 . 2 November 2022 . ...a musicale by Chinese performers, to collect money for the rebuilding of the church at Washington and Stockton streets, San Francisco, which has been in ruins since the fire..
  19. Web site: 150TH ANNIVERSARY (2018) . Chinese United Methodist Church of San Francisco . 22 October 2022 . In 1868, Reverend Dr. Otis Gibson and his wife, Eliza, founded the Church with the mission to protect the Chinese from the violence of racial prejudice. They tried to not only guide the Chinese people spiritually but also to teach them English. In 1906, the great earthquake destroyed the Church building. In 1911, after five years of displacement, the Church was rebuilt at the corner of Washington and Stockton Streets..
  20. Web site: JAPANESE CHURCH, Opening of the First in America . cdnc.ucr.edu . San Francisco Call, Volume 77, Number 3, 3 December 1894 . 2 November 2022.