Mary Louise Graffam was born at Monson, Maine, in 1871, graduated from Oberlin in 1894, and went out to Sivas for the American Board in 1901 as principal of the girls' school.
In July 1915 she left Sivas with the deportation convoy that was carrying her own students, and the gendarmes turned her back near Malatia. Her account of what she saw reached the State Department through Ambassador Morgenthau and was printed in the Missionary Herald that December.
She stayed in the interior through the war as the only American in the city. Afterward she gathered the surviving children into orphanages and set up spinning, weaving, and carpentry shops and leased farms to feed them.
She took over as director of the Near East Relief unit at Sivas early in 1920, when Ernest Partridge went home. She underwent surgery at Sivas in August 1921 and did not recover. She died on the seventeenth, aged fifty. Two American nurses and an Armenian physician, Dr. Hekimian, attended her, and the unit's message home said that the impossible could not be done.
Turkish officials came to the funeral the next morning and sent an escort of soldiers and gendarmes. She was buried at Sivas, and Annie T. Allen was buried beside her six months later.
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