A DEDICATED LIFE

ANNIE T. ALLEN

1868-1922

Annie was the fifth of six children born to Orson and Caroline Wheeler Allen, missionaries sent to the Near East by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.  All the children were born in Harpout in eastern Turkey.  

Orson was born in 1827.  He graduated from Amherst College and Andover Seminary.  He married in September of 1855 and sailed from Boston in October of that year with his bride.  He remained on the mission field until 1896, when he resigned and returned to America.  His wife died in 1898.  The first three of his children had died very young, and at the time his wife died, two of his three children were still on the Mission Field, and Orson moved back to Turkey to be with them.  Daughter Annie had graduated from Dana Hall, Wellesley, Bible Normal, Springfield, Mt. Holyoke College in 1890. She left Boston in 1890 to help her parents in Harpout.  She received full missionary status and appointment in 1903.

According to the James L Barton, author of "The Story of the Near East Relief (1915-1930," Annie T. Allen, of Auburndale, MA, for many years engaged in mission work in Turkey, died from typhus at Sivas on February 2, 1922,  From the time that the Turkish Nationalist regime was set up in Angora (today's Ankara), she was the representative of the Near East Relief in that city and acted as a liaison officer with the government.  At the time of her death she had journeyed several hundred miles overland on horseback to Kharput in mid-winter to investigate conditions among Armenian and Greek deportees, then on the march to exile, and to adjust difficulties between relief workers and the local government in the city of Kharput.  The weather was bitterly cold and traveling difficult.  She contracted typhus from the refugees she was attempting to help.  She died in Sivas on 2 Feb 1922.  She was 54 years old.