Richard Emrich †

Richard Stanley Merrill Emrich sailed for Turkey in the summer of 1905 for the American Board and spent the next nine years at Mardin, in eastern Turkey, as principal of the High School for Boys. He developed industrial training for the students there. War conditions forced him home in 1914.

In February 1919, he sailed again aboard the Leviathan with the first large party of American relief workers sent out after the armistice, and was assigned to Syria. The party crossed the mountains inland from Constantinople (Istanbul) in unheated boxcars. Emrich fell ill on that journey and died at Aleppo on 4 May 1919, about eight weeks after landing. He was buried there. The American Board, writing two months afterward, gave the cause as influenza. Barton, writing eleven years afterward, gave a heavy cold that turned to pneumonia.