Ernest A. Yarrow

Ernest A. Yarrow (1876–1939) was born in London and raised in the United States. He reached Van in 1904 as a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, took charge of the boys' schools, and served as treasurer of the station. He was in the city in 1915 when Turkish forces massacred the Armenians of Van vilayet and the city's Armenians mounted their month-long defense. During the siege Yarrow organized the committees that governed the besieged population. Clarence Ussher, the mission's physician, recorded that Yarrow "organized a government with a mayor, judges, police, and board of health." He left Van with the refugee columns, and in July 1916 he went back to the Caucasus to work among Armenian survivors. From October 1916 to May 1918 he sat on the committee at Tiflis (Tbilisi), with U.S. Consul F. Willoughby Smith and others, that set relief policy across the Caucasus and accounted to America for the funds it spent.

In 1919 Yarrow served as a staff officer on Colonel William N. Haskell's mission to Armenia. When Haskell and his army aides withdrew to Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1920 as Bolshevik forces advanced, Yarrow took charge of the civilian relief workers who stayed, and he succeeded Haskell as director of Near East Relief in the Caucasus. He ran the Caucasus operation until 1922, through the Turkish Nationalist invasion and the Soviet takeover. He secured the new government's agreement that the Americans could continue the orphanages, and he arranged the return to Alexandropol (Gyumri) of the Armenian children who had been left at Kars during the Turkish occupation. Near East Relief credited him with the street-cleaning and irrigation projects that put refugees to work for wages, and with the organization that cared for 30,000 children in its Caucasus orphanages. Persia awarded him the Order of the Lion and the Sun in July 1922. He died at Middletown, Connecticut, on October 26, 1939, at 63.