Annie T. Allen †

Annie Theresa Allen was born on December 21, 1868, in Harpoot (Harput), Ottoman Empire, the daughter of pioneer American Board (ABCFM) missionaries Rev. Orson P. Allen and Caroline R. Wheeler Allen. The One Hundred Year Biographical Directory of Mount Holyoke College, 1837–1937, records "Annie Teresa Allen 1890 … missionary American Board 1890-1896 Harpoot Turkey … missionary American Board 1903-1922 Brousa Turkey died 1922 in Sivas Turkey … Mother was Caroline R. Wheeler."

She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1890, returned to the field at Harpoot and Van, and in 1903 took a full American Board appointment to teach at the Broussa (Bursa) Girls' School. She remained in Turkey through the First World War and the Armenian Genocide, declined a postwar furlough, and joined Near East Relief. Fluent in Turkish and Armenian, she traveled the Anatolian interior on relief surveys and kept a diary that Near East Relief published in its newsletter on April 9, 1921.

In 1921, Near East Relief made her, in the words of its own July 15, 1922 newsletter, "the first representative of the Near East Relief and American interests at Angora, the Turkish Nationalist Capital." She was the only American at Angora (Ankara) in the earliest days of the Nationalist movement and acted as an unofficial liaison between Mustafa Kemal's government and the relief organization. She met Kemal and his chief of staff in April 1921, securing a guarantee of safety for Americans under Nationalist control and the right for relief workers to travel within Turkey, an agreement that helped the evacuation of orphans from the interior. As Barton's The Story of Near East Relief records, at her death, "she had journeyed almost five hundred miles overland to Harpoot to investigate conditions among Armenian and Greek deportees, then on the march to exile." She contracted typhus and died at Sivas on February 2, 1922.