Early Chinese Laundries, Target for Racist for Decades

May 31st 1885, John C. Montgomery carried out a census of the residents of the small dusty town of Grand Junction. Of the 378 residents, all were white except for Chinese immigrants: Sam Sing and Yup Mow. Each had established a laundry service. Sam Sing’s shop was on Main Street, while Yup Mow’s business was on Colorado Avenue.

By the end of 1882, both Sam and Yup’s laundries were up and running. Yup Mow came from the Gunnison area and was the first Chinese immigrant to relocate here.

At about the same time, Chinese laborers were working on the Excelsior Train Station near the Utah boarder. The station serviced the narrow-gauge railroad that ran from Grand Junction to Salt Lake City.

Colorado at the time was not friendly to Chinese labor on the railroads or in the mines. It had been thought that no Chinese labor was used building railroads in Colorado, but an archaeological survey and dig was carried out by the Dominquez Archaeological Research Group (DARG) which found numerous and clustered artifacts proving that Chinese laborers did work and inhabit the area around the Excelsior station. When the standard-gauge railroad finally came through the valley in 1890, it bypassed the station and it fell into disuse.

The town of Grand Junction was just three years old (1885) when the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The act not only made immigration from China all but impossible, it also made Chinese immigrants already here like Sam Sing and Yup Mow, resident aliens with no civil rights. The act was only finally repealed in the early 1940s.

The 1880’s and 90’s were rampant with anti-Chinese racism. Almost all labor unions supported the Chinese Exclusion Act. In the west, massacres of Chinese laborers took place in 1885 in Rock Springs, WY, and again in 1887 in Hell’s Canyon, Oregon.

Starting in 1895, white owned Merchants Laundry ran ads in the Daily Sentinel that stated: “Don’t denounce Chinese labor and then patronize Chinese laundries, but get your work done at the Merchants’ Laundry”

In 1900, it was reported that “The Chinese Laundry was attacked by hoodlums last night and much property damaged.”

In 1905, Arthur Bruch was arrested and held in jail for smashing the window of one of the ‘Chinese laundry’s’.

And again, on March 7th, 1921, police were called to Yup Mow’s laundry on Colorado Avenue. Where he had been attacked by two men and had received “a number of cuts inflicted by his assailants.”