The Queen City was not always the safe place for young single women it is now. During the 1890s, the Bangor riverfront, where the train station and steamship wharf were located, often teemed with drunken men fresh from a long season in an all-male logging camp.
It was not a place most good Christian men, let alone women, cared to linger alone, except to evangelize. The King’s Daughters Home offered a refuge to young women stranded by a missed connection, storm or lack of funds to continue their journeys.
More than 117 years after its founding in 1891 by the local chapter of the International Order of King’s Daughters and Sons, the KDH still is a haven for young women. Instead of harboring girls from Aroostook County, Mount Desert Island or Boston as it did at the turn of the last century, its modern-day boarders come from much farther away — China and Vietnam.
Instead of learning about the home from notices posted in the train station and the steamship wharf or the local police, they found it on the Internet. And just one of them considers herself a Christian.
Zhi Yu “Vicki” Wen, 17, Ya Zhi “Yolanda” Wu, 17, both of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), China, and Van
Nguyen, 20, of Randolph, Mass., and Vietnam, live at KDH with a husband-and-wife team of caretakers, Dave and Lauretta Kulp, both 56. Vicki and Yolanda are students at Bangor Christian High School on outer Broadway. Van is in the pre-pharmacy program at Husson University in Bangor.
Vicki, a high school junior, has been at the home since August, while Van, who regularly attends Mass at St. Mary Catholic Church in Bangor, arrived in September as a transfer student from Boston. Yolanda is the newcomer. The high school sophomore arrived last month.
All three said Saturday morning as they sat around the kitchen table with the Kulps that they came to the United States for the educational opportunities available. Vicki and Yolanda both plan to attend college in the U.S. after completing high school because getting into Chinese universities is very difficult, the girls said.
“The hardest thing is English,” said Vicki, who took English classes in China. “English and American literature.”
Van transferred from a college in Boston to Husson because it was less expensive, she said. She is one of five girls in her family. Three of her sisters live in Randolph, Mass., she said. One is in high school and the two older sisters work in the area.
Yolanda’s first choices to study abroad were Australia and Europe.
“My father like this country,” she said. “He say United States best schools.”
Yolanda, who plans to study financing and business management in college to help with the family business of running high-rise apartment buildings, was leery of America’s gun culture. Although she has overcome her initial culture shock, she still is concerned about school shootings. The news of student killings at Columbine High School and Virginia Technical University were broadcast in China, she said.
“That’s the first reason I don’t want come to U.S.,” she said. “Everybody buy gun. I may go to college in another state. I must think about [being] safe.”
Vicki wants to study psychology in college.
“It’s interesting [to learn] about what people think, why they do things, especially bad things,” she said. “Many people have problems in their hearts, all have pressure.”
Living at KDH is a way to avoid adding to the pressure the girls already feel as foreign students, the Kulps said.
“It is a quiet place for study,” said Van, who chose it over dorm life. “Many students are going about having parties and you share the bathroom with more people [in a dorm].”
Yolanda and Vicki were recruited to Bangor Christian in a new cross-cultural program similar to ones available at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield and Washington Academy in Machias. Those schools have dormitories, but Bangor Christian does not.
The Kulps, who left Aroostook County in 1995 for 10 years of full-time missionary work in Africa, returned to Maine in 2007 when Dave, a builder by trade, was offered the job overseeing construction of a new Christian camp in Guilford. They had been running a similar camp in the Catskills.
“The Lord led us back here,” Lauretta said, “but we had no place to stay. Bangor [Christian] needed a place for the Chinese girls but the King’s Daughters House had no house parents and was barely able to keep going.”
Without the income from the foreign students and finding the Kulps, KDH treasurer Alan Paradis, 62, of Bangor said Saturday, the house would have had to close.
The home has five private rooms on the second floor and a dormitory area on the third floor that is not being used. Second-floor residents share a large bathroom with two showers, according to information on the home’s Web site. Room rates are $500 to $600 each month and include weekday breakfasts and suppers. They do not apply to the high school students whose rent is paid by Bangor Christian as part of their tuition. All of the girls’ meals are covered.
Each evening after supper, Dave conducts Bible study and introduces Yolanda and Vicki to Christianity. On Friday nights, they all watch a movie together with the closed-caption setting turned on. Last week, it was “The Ten Commandments” starring Charlton Heston.
Neither knew much about Christianity before coming to the U.S.
“They believe God, go to church, sing, and Christmas is for the birth of a holy man,” Vicki said was all she knew about Christianity before coming to the U.S. Now she knows the Trinity — “Three in one.”
Yolanda said that she looks forward to going to chapel each morning at school.
“I like the songs,” she said. “It’s very beautiful and inspired from love of God.”
The Kulps also take them shopping, a favorite activity that includes trips to the grocery store so they can find more familiar foods. Yolanda has been disappointed she has not been able to find fresher fish.
They also cross-country ski with Lauretta, have been snowboarding and are looking forward to a trip to Baxter State Park in June. While they don’t have plans for school vacation this week, the Kulps have planned a trip to Washington, D.C., during the April break.
The Kulps, who met in 1971 when they were counselors at Camp Fairhaven in Brooks, raised three daughters and have eight grandchildren under age 9, with two more on the way.
“It’s not a whole lot different,” Dave said of being a father to his daughters and being a house parent to Van, Yolanda and Vicki.
Nor is the way KDH is carrying out its mission more than a century after its founding.
jharrison@bangordailynews.net
990-8207
BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTOS BY KATE COLLINS
Residents of King’s Daughters Home (from left) Ya Zhi “Yolanda” Wu and Van Nguyen pass plates as they sit down for dinner with resident directors Dave and Lauretta Kulp and fellow resident Zhi Yu “Vicki” Wen on Thursday. The Bangor residence has been offering young women Christian living accommodations for more than 100 years.
Van Nguyen (right) laughs while resident director Lauretta Kulp checks on dinner in the kitchen of King’s Daughters Home. Two meals a day are part of the amenities for young women staying at the home.
Bangor Daily News, 1905
Not long ago on a cold, rainy, blustering night, after 12 o’clock, a patrolman found a girl on Main Street, thinly clad, and shivering. Upon questioning her the officer learned that she was a stranger in the city in search of work, and that she had been wandering about the streets all night, not knowing where to lay her head.
If there had been no King’s Daughters’ Home she would have been taken to the police station for shelter, among the criminal inmates, to her shame and degradation. As it was the policeman at once went with her to the home and upon application from him she was admitted, warmed, fed and given a clean bed to sleep in. She stayed at the home until she found work, and so, perhaps, was saved from many things that might have befallen her.
When the patrolman who found this girl told the incident sometime afterwards, he said, Every time I pass that house, and see the lights in the windows, I feel like thanking God that there is such a place in Bangor.
What is the King’s Daughters Home?
The King’s Daughters Home is part of the International Order of King’s Daughters and Sons based in Chautauqua, N.Y. That group was founded in January 1886 as an organization of Christian men and women dedicated to service in Christ’s name.
The objectives of the order are “the development of spiritual life and the stimulation of Christian activities.” Today, it operates boardinghouses, hospitals, child care centers and a variety of other services, according to information published on its Web site, www.iokds.org.
The Bangor home was founded in 1891 by the local chapter made up of women representatives from 14 Bangor churches in or on the edge of downtown. It began as the idea of Mrs. Louis Sterns, wife of a professor at Bangor Theological Seminary. Its first location was a rented property at 35 Columbia St.
The home was moved to the circa-1853 Italianate-style house at 89 Ohio St. in December 1905 after the house, owned by Dr. Thomas Upham Coe, was donated to the King’s Daughters. It has been expanded and renovated over the years, but its purpose essentially has remained the same since it moved more than 103 years ago — to serve as a steppingstone for young women as they begin the process of living independently.
Of the original churches that organized KDH, 12 still are involved after two merged in 1912 and one, First Christian Church, went out of existence in 1961 and left KDH an endowment. The remaining dozen are Advent Christian, All Souls Congregational, Columbia Street Baptist, First Baptist, Essex Street Baptist, First United Methodist, Grace United Methodist, Hammond Street Congregational, St. John Catholic, St. Mary Catholic, St. John’s Episcopal and the Unitarian Universalist Society.
Source: www.allsoulsbangor.com/kdh.