After meeting Elizabeth Russell from the Cincinnati branch, the two women sailed from San Francisco for Nagasaki, via Yokohama, on October 25, 1879, reaching their destination on November 23, 1879.
[5] The two women were cordially received at the port of Nagasaki by John Carrol Davidson and his wife, who had been sent there by the American Episcopal Methodist Church in 1873 when the edict prohibiting Christianity was abolished by the Meiji Government.
Davidson had built a Methodist church in Dejima in 1876 and sent a letter to WFMS requesting two female missionaries to establish a girls’ school.
Shortly thereafter, Russell founded a mission school for girls in the foreign settlement in Higashi-Yamate, Nagasaki on December 1, 1879.
She set up orphanages, kindergartens for the poor, and Sunday schools for illiteracy, health, and vocational training for women.