Charles Chapin Tracy, first president of the Anadolu Koleji in Merzifon, known in American sources as Anatolia College, was an American missionary who had grown up in a farmhouse on the wooded Pennsylvania frontier and prepared for college by reading textbooks in the fields. In the autumn of 1867 he reached Merzifon on horseback with his young wife, and for forty-six years, apart from a few furloughs and a short spell in Istanbul, he lived in that town. The high school he started with four pupils in a low basement room grew into a four-year college in 1886; when Tracy retired in 1913, the campus held a main building, dormitories, a library-museum, workshops, a girls' school, a school for the deaf and a hospital.

Tracy's connection with Amasya does not run through Merzifon alone. After 1879 he spent two winters in Amasya with his family and took charge of the Protestant community's schools there. The college itself stood in Merzifon, a district of the Sanjak of Amasya, and at critical moments in its history, in 1902 and in 1921, it was in Amasya that its students and teachers were tried. The college's relations with the Ottoman administration, with the Greek and Armenian communities and later with the Ankara government are still told differently in two separate historiographies. Most of what is known of Tracy's life comes from the biography his successor George E. White published a year after his death; White's admiration for Tracy and his view of the Ottoman government are felt throughout the text, and the book's interpretations should be read with that in mind.

Childhood and Youth

Charles Chapin Tracy was born on 31 October 1838 at East Smithfield, Pennsylvania, the sixth of the seven children of Orramel and Cynthia Kellogg Tracy. His father's family had migrated from Connecticut in 1805 and his mother's from Vermont in 1801, settling in a frontier community near the junction of the Susquehanna and Chemung rivers. Tracy grew up in a two-room log cabin built around a huge fireplace. White describes how the family spun and wove its own flax and wool, how an itinerant shoemaker visiting the house made the children one pair of shoes a year, and how on winter evenings the father read Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress aloud by the hearth. The family's piety was strict: at family prayers, held twice a day, the Bible was read through from beginning to end twenty-two times. Tracy lost his mother at fifteen and his father before he turned twenty-one. His brother Alonzo died at Gettysburg in the Civil War.

Before Pennsylvania established a public school system, four Tracy brothers living on neighbouring farms kept a family school for their children for three months each winter; this was where Tracy received his basic education. When an academy opened in the village he attended it for a term or two, went briefly to the high school at Athens, and taught school himself for a term. He began Latin and Greek with the help of Nancy Corss, sister of the pastor Charles Chapin Corss for whom he was named; beyond that he taught himself. White writes that on his twenty-first birthday, working in the stony fields, he carried a textbook with him and dug into it at intervals. His love of music also dates from these years: having no money, he made himself a violin with a pocket knife and a few simple tools. On 4 July 1858 he joined the church and resolved to become a minister.

Williams College and Union Theological Seminary

In 1862 he applied to Williams College in Massachusetts and was admitted directly to the junior class. As White tells it, when the examining professor asked where he had prepared and received the answer "On the farm", he gave him a passage of Caesar and half an hour to prepare, whereupon Tracy glanced at the text and said he was ready. He formed a lifelong friendship with the college's celebrated president, Mark Hopkins. To pay his bills he lived in the tower and rang the college bell. In 1864 he graduated as class poet and with Phi Beta Kappa rank. Williams later conferred on him the degree of Master of Arts in 1867 and an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1894.

From Williams he went on to Union Theological Seminary in New York. He spent one summer vacation in mission work in Minnesota and another in Chicago. In White's text the year of his graduation from Union is printed as 1864; but since Tracy graduated from Williams and entered Union that same year, and the voyage to Turkey took place in 1867, the date must evidently be 1867. White gives the sequence as follows: graduation in June, ordination by the Third Presbytery of New York on 17 July, marriage to Myra H. Park on 14 August and departure for Turkey on 24 August. In his application to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Tracy explained his wish to become a missionary by saying that it was the most direct work for the advancement of Christ's kingdom.

The Merzifon Station and the First Years

American Board missionaries had been visiting Merzifon since the 1850s. According to White, in 1860 J. Y. Leonard and his wife, of the Kayseri station, settled in the town permanently. In 1862 the mission decided to move its theological seminary and girls' boarding school to some point in the interior, and Merzifon was chosen. In 1863 the Dodd family was transferred from İzmir and the J. F. Smith family and Eliza Fritcher were sent out from America. White relates that Leonard, Dodd and Smith rode up to a spur of the Tavşan Mountains and organised the station under a pine tree. The school had its origins in Istanbul: the seminary Cyrus Hamlin opened at Bebek in 1840 had in time divided in two, Hamlin remaining in Istanbul to found Robert College while theological education and the girls' school moved to Merzifon.

After a three-day ride from the coast over mountains and through forests, Tracy and his wife reached Merzifon on 28 October 1867. White writes that the town then had some fifteen thousand inhabitants and looked like an overgrown village of Turkish and Armenian quarters, and that the first missionaries had found only two houses with glass in their windows. The young couple's first task was to learn Armenian, and both came to speak it with ease. Tracy's letter describing his first impressions plainly shows the missionary outlook of the time: he portrays the country as given over to selfishness, bribery and injustice, judges its government in harsh terms, and then says that they are content with the beauty of the plain and the scale of the work. These lines reflect the prejudices of Tracy's own time and circle; they cannot be taken as an impartial account of the town's real condition. His wife Myra Tracy, for her part, says that on first seeing Merzifon she found it a dreary place with narrow, dirty streets and not a tree in sight, but that because there was already a congregation of 300 and a Sunday school, their first years were happy ones.

Tracy began teaching at the seminary. At its first commencement in 1868, eight men from the theological course and five pupils from the girls' school received diplomas. According to White, at the institution's jubilee in 1914 it was stated that 119 men had graduated and about 180 had been enrolled, and that Tracy, despite his furloughs, had taught nearly every one of them for at least part of the course. He taught exposition of Scripture and the evidences of Christianity; his notes on the Epistle to the Hebrews grew out of these classes.

Istanbul, Famine and the First Furlough

In 1870, when his wife's health became critical and there was no doctor in Merzifon, the family was transferred to Istanbul. There Tracy founded an Armenian children's paper (Child's Paper), which he also published in Armeno-Turkish and in Greek; for three years he wrote all its contents with his own hand. He also published a small book in Armenian, Letters to Families. White notes that Tracy's name came to be included in lists of Armenian authors, a recognition that few missionaries ever attained. Of their first three children, one died in Merzifon, one in Istanbul and one early in their first furlough.

When the Smith family went on furlough, the Tracys were called back to Merzifon. In 1873-1874 the region suffered a severe drought followed by famine. White describes Muslims and Christians praying for rain in their cemeteries and sanctuaries, and hundreds of starving people from the worse-stricken districts further east taking refuge in Merzifon. With aid from America and other Christian countries, the missionaries set up soup kitchens and distributed bread, and later helped villagers obtain seed wheat and animals. In the fever that followed the famine, Myra Tracy and two of the children fell ill, Tracy himself broke down, and the family returned to America in poor health. They had been away for eight years; during a furlough of three years Tracy worked on the farm again and spoke in churches about the mission.

Two Winters in Amasya

At forty he returned to Merzifon with his wife and their two sons, Charles Kellogg and Henry Chester. As White tells it, in these years just after the Congress of Berlin of 1878, a macadamised road had replaced the bridle path up from the coast. The mission's out-stations were developing in cities such as Samsun and Amasya and in villages such as Kapıkaya. In 1879 the station decided, as an experiment, to scatter its forces somewhat, and the Tracy family spent two winters in Amasya.

White describes Amasya as "that large city on the banks of the Iris River where once King Mithridates had his capital". There were three mission schools for girls in the city and day and evening schools for boys, and the Tracys took charge of these schools. The children remembered the Amasya winters as dreary and lonesome; White writes that the parents were happy in their missionary work, while the daily life of an American family in the city was obscure and humdrum. The experiment did not last: the mission decided that it was wiser to concentrate the Americans at the centre and manage the out-stations by touring. An anecdote White records from Amasya shows the distance between the missionaries and the townspeople. Myra Tracy had given a preparation of iron to a neighbour's child; a woman standing by, complaining of poor appetite, asked for some, but as soon as she had taken it she ran off in alarm, crying that she had taken Protestant medicine and it would make a Protestant of her.

Amasya's connection with the college continued after Tracy's short residence there. As the seat of the sanjak, the city was where cases involving the students of Merzifon were heard. According to White, in 1902 several students of the college were imprisoned in Amasya on a charge of sedition for possessing or using one or two national or patriotic songs. The trial dragged on for more than a year; in the end some were acquitted and the others sentenced to a year's imprisonment, and since all of them had already been held for more than a year, they were released together. The 1921 trials that brought the college to its end were also held in Amasya, as noted below.

The local historian of Amasya, Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, looks at the founding of the college through different eyes. In the Merzifon section of his Amasya Tarihi, he writes that in 1300 (1882-83) the Americans opened their school, known as the "Kollej", on a high and handsome site in the town, followed a programme at the level of the rüşdiye and idadi schools, and built a craft workshop and a hospital open to all. Hüsameddin holds that the school's activities served less to spread education than to nourish the political ideas of Armenian youths, and adds that this led to the reform of the Islamic madrasas in Merzifon and the opening of primary and rüşdiye schools. The date 1300 that Hüsameddin gives may correspond to the beginning of the high school that preceded the college; the college itself opened in 1886.

The Founding of the College

In his own account, quoted in Joseph K. Greene's mission history published in 1916, Tracy relates that the station's theological seminary and high school were carried on at the American Board's expense until 1881-1882, after which the missionaries came to believe that a broader system of education was needed in which the people would share the costs. With this in mind, Tracy was asked to start a high school in which students would pay both for board and for tuition. Some in the mission thought the attempt visionary, but Tracy started the school with four boys in a low basement room where one could stand on the floor and lay a flat hand on the ceiling. Within a year there were thirty students, and within three years 120. White calls it the "High School in a Cellar" and writes that it graduated its first and only class in 1886 and was merged into Anatolia College. In the framework given by Turkish researchers, the Harbinger High School, opened in 1883 with four male pupils under Tracy's leadership together with the seminary teachers George F. Herrick, John F. Smith and Edward Riggs, is the nucleus of the Anadolu Koleji.

Anatolia College began instruction on 8 September 1886. According to White, of the Board's four men in Merzifon, Smith was a sound and conservative financier, Edward Riggs a broad and thorough scholar, Herrick a strong administrator, and Tracy the president of the institution from the start. The first Board of Managers included Armenian members, among them Garabed Thoumayan and Dr. Melcon Altounian. According to Greene, an attempt was made to run the college with local contributions and joint management, but after a few years, because of political conditions and the failure of local support, the Americans took over the whole enterprise. Herrick proposed the name "Anatolia"; Edward Riggs chose as the motto "The Morning Cometh", which suited the meaning of the name, "land of the rising sun". The college seal showed the sun rising over the shoulder of a mountain, as seen from its front door. The Board granted the college $1,200 a year and allowed it to share the narrow grounds and small building of the seminary.

The course consisted of four collegiate and two preparatory years; the preparatory course was later extended to three and then four years. The aim was to give an adequate working knowledge of English together with Turkish, the language of the country, French, the common language of the Levant, and the student's own vernacular, Armenian or Greek, as well as a basic education in the sciences, mathematics, history, philosophy, economics and Scripture. According to Greene, in the first year there were 130 pupils in the preparatory and regular classes, 27 of them Greeks and the rest Armenians.

The Presidency

Under Tracy's administration most of the teaching staff were local teachers, subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Promising graduates were taken on as teachers and, with loans if necessary, sent to Europe or America for advanced study. White writes that teachers such as Manissadjian, Sivaslian, Theocharides, Hagopian, Xenides and Daghlian were trained in this way. Most of the students came from poor homes; discipline was strict and the college table plain. White relates that in the early years a student rebellion against the rules on attendance at religious services ended with nearly twenty students being dismissed. The college maintained an evangelical Christian position, and White notes that the Eastern Christians, too, were jealous for their own churches and wary of Protestant influence.

Building permits were hard to obtain. Applications from foreigners for new buildings in the provinces had to be sent to Istanbul, where, in White's phrase, they were likely to be lost "under the cushion". Tracy's answer was to enlarge a woodshed, then put a second storey on it, then add a wing; some local governors said they could not authorise a new structure but would construe a permit for repairs liberally. The old college building grew in this way, and the hospital too began in a rebuilt shed for drying lumber and worked there for fifteen years. When no one could be found to teach physics, Tracy taught it himself for several years.

In November 1890 George E. White and his wife arrived in Merzifon; a week later the Tracy family left on furlough. According to White, Tracy then resigned the headship and Herrick became the college's second president; Greene likewise records that Herrick served as president for more than two years. Tracy devoted the furlough to finding supporters for the college. The philanthropist D. K. Pearsons, whom he met in Chicago, and his wife gave the college more than seventy thousand dollars. In 1893 Tracy published Talks on the Veranda, a book of missionary conversations, and returned to Merzifon that summer. In White's account he appears as president again after this date. Greene writes that Tracy served as president for twenty-six years in all.

The college's legal position was settled in two steps. According to White, the college was incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts on 14 March 1894, with the Prudential Committee of the Board as its trustees; Greene, however, gives September 1886 as the date of the charter obtained from Massachusetts. Ottoman recognition came on Friday, 14 April 1899. White describes how the imperial firman was read by a scribe on the east balcony of the college before the civil, military and religious authorities, headed by the governor, and a colonel's troops with bugles and drums, and was then presented to Tracy; Professor Hagopian replied on behalf of the college and Edward Riggs offered a prayer in Turkish.

Tracy placed particular weight on the principle of self-help. Workshops for furniture-making, bookbinding, shoemaking and tailoring were set up so that poor students could meet part of their expenses by manual labour. Among the aims Tracy set down were to teach the students the dignity of labour, to guard them against bookishness and to recover part of the cost through sales. Gifts made during the furlough of 1902-1905 enlarged the shops, which took the name Wickes Industrial Self-Help and included a flour mill. In 1913, 112 students were enrolled in this department.

The Events of 1893 and 1895

Tracy's presidency coincided with a period of Armenian political organisation in Merzifon and of harsh state reaction against it. White writes that the American missionaries opposed this revolutionary movement throughout as irreligious, impractical and dangerous, but found themselves in a difficult position between the duty of loyalty to the government of a country in which they were guests and the fact that students could not remain untouched by events around them. On 5 January 1893 revolutionary placards were posted at Yozgat and on the walls of the college in Merzifon. According to a British account White quotes, the object was to compromise the missionaries; the Americans were accused of issuing the placards, two Armenian professors were imprisoned and the girls' school was burned down. The Ottoman view, reflected also in Hüsameddin's book, was that the college nourished the political feelings of the Armenian youths among its students; the two sides tell the same events differently, each from its own documents and testimony.

White writes that on Friday, 15 November 1895, an attack on the Armenians lasting four hours took place in Merzifon, that about 125 people were killed and the Armenian shops in the market were looted, and that the crowd first made for the American compound but did not enter it. Around four o'clock the governor came to the compound and left some forty soldiers there. After these events the Tracys led in establishing two orphanages, for boys and for girls, on the premises; according to White more than two hundred children were sheltered, taught and given a trade there. The orphanages were later merged into the college and the girls' school. Myra Tracy had nursed the sick in the cholera epidemic of 1894; in a letter quoted by Greene, Tracy wrote that his wife cared for some five hundred cholera patients.

The Clubs and the Political Controversy

When the constitution was proclaimed in 1908, according to White, the college's Christian students greeted the news that they would now serve in the army with cheers, regarding it as a step towards equal rights. In the new atmosphere of liberty of those same years, however, the students refused class by class to obey the college's rules, and there was a serious rebellion in which the faculty restored order while retaining every student. Each nationality in the college had its own club; after 1908 the Greek students' "Pontus" club and the Armenian students' "Shavarshan" club each began publishing a newspaper. White writes that these were the first two newspapers printed in Merzifon and that the clubs' aims were literary, musical and athletic.

Research based on Turkish archival documents gives these clubs a different meaning. According to Gülbadi Alan, the Pontus Club founded in 1904, the Greek-Rum Athletic Club founded the same year and the Rum Culture Club founded in 1907 were created with the support of the missionaries teaching at the college; after 1908 the Pontus Club expanded by opening branches along the Black Sea coast, and a letter its president wrote in 1908 to a society in Samsun ended with the words "long live Greece, long live liberation". The college administrators, for their part, maintained that the clubs were literary societies founded so that students could learn their mother tongues. The documents of the two sides paint different pictures of the clubs' real character, and this controversy forms the background to the process that ended with the closure of the college after Tracy's retirement.

The Builder of the College

White remembers Tracy above all as a builder. The mission grounds lay on the northern edge of the town, on ground a little higher than the rest of it. The first buildings were of sun-dried mud brick, the next of kiln-burned brick filling a timber frame; in his last years Tracy moved on to modern construction in stone, brick, cement and iron girders. North College, Alumni Hall, the hospital and later Kennedy Home were built in this new style. Under Tracy's direction a workman located a stone quarry in the foothills about a mile from the college, and stone from this quarry, leased from the government, was hauled to the new buildings. He bought a machine for making flat Marseilles-type roof tiles. He built a tower for the Swiss clock bought by the alumni association; according to White, the Protestant and Gregorian schools began to set their hours by it, and the town gradually adopted Western time instead of reckoning twelve o'clock from sunset. Tracy also directed most of the construction of the girls' school buildings.

The college's student body changed over the course of Tracy's presidency. At first Armenians were in the majority, then Greeks took the lead, and students began to arrive from Russia. White writes that the arrival of the Russians encouraged Turkish young men as well, that the number of Turkish students passed twenty, and that the first Turkish graduate received his diploma in 1914. For the academic year 1913-1914 White gives 425 students (about 200 Greeks, 160 Armenians, 40 Russians and 25 Turks), while Greene gives 405 (194 Greeks, 157 Armenians, 32 Russians and 16 Turks). The library had reached 10,000 volumes and the natural history museum founded by Manissadjian more than 7,000 specimens.

Retirement and Final Years

In September 1913 Tracy preached his last sermon in the college on the word "Ebenezer", "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us", recounting the institution's ups and downs. That same year he returned to America with his wife. Greene and Turkish researchers write that he stepped down from the presidency in 1913 and was succeeded by White; according to White's biography, his resignation took effect at the Commencement of 1914 and Tracy was elected President Emeritus. Forty-six years had passed since they first came to Merzifon. In June 1914 he wrote a hymn, "Ebenezer", for the jubilee of the girls' school.

The Tracys settled in Los Angeles, where their son Chester taught botany in a high school, and bought a house called "Sunset Lodge" in Hollywood with borrowed money. The war had made a return to Merzifon uncertain. In 1915 the Armenian community of Merzifon was deported. White's biography describes this deportation and the killing of eight Armenian members of the college faculty in severe language and states that 12,000 Armenians were removed from the town. Cemal Güven examines White's account as an example of propaganda aimed at American public opinion and notes that, according to archival documents, the number of Armenians whose relocation from Merzifon was decided was 8,030. These events are still named differently in two separate historiographies today.

In Los Angeles Tracy worked on organising committees for Armenian and Syrian relief, gave addresses and wrote for the press. White writes that he left questions of international politics aside and gave himself to the work of relief. In September 1916 he entered hospital with a stomach ulcer, and in April 1917 the illness returned. On 12 April he gave his last address at a relief meeting, and on the night of Thursday, 19 April 1917, he died at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. At the funeral in the Methodist Church of Hollywood on 22 April, Armenians were the pall-bearers; he was buried in Hollywood cemetery. His wife, Myra Park Tracy, wrote that she lost him shortly before the golden wedding they had hoped to celebrate in August.

The Later Fate of the College

The college had closed before Tracy's death. After the Russian advance on the Eastern Front the region was declared a war zone; on 10 May 1916 the campus was requisitioned for use as a military hospital and the American staff were sent to Istanbul. Although teaching resumed briefly after the war, during the Turkish War of Independence, in 1921, the Ankara government had the college and hospital searched, documents belonging to the Pontus Club were seized and the college was closed. Leaders of the club and some former teachers of the college were tried before the Independence Tribunal in Amasya and executed; Turkish and Western sources differ on the number of those tried and on the date. The college reopened in Thessaloniki in 1924 as Anatolia College, and it still traces its founding to Merzifon in 1886. White had written that Tracy's birthday, 31 October, would be celebrated at the college as Founders' Day.

The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam entry on Merzifon counts the American College buildings, with their hospital, school and library on the highest point in the north of the town, among the notable monuments of Merzifon today. The college hymn "Morning Cometh", which Tracy himself wrote, and his poem "The Mountains of Pontus", written in Merzifon in 1912, appear at the end of White's book; the second speaks of the Tavşan Mountains and of the Kızılırmak and Yeşilırmak flowing to the Black Sea.

Chronology

31 October 1838: Born at East Smithfield, Pennsylvania.

4 July 1858: Joined the church.

1862: Entered the junior class at Williams College.

1864: Graduated from Williams College; entered Union Theological Seminary.

1867: Ordained, married Myra H. Park and sailed for Turkey.

28 October 1867: Arrived in Merzifon.

1868: First commencement of the Merzifon theological seminary.

1870: Transferred with his family to Istanbul.

1873-1874: Famine relief in Merzifon; then furlough in America.

1879: Settled with his family in Amasya and spent two winters there.

1883: The high school that formed the nucleus of the college opened under Tracy's leadership (after 1881-1882 according to Greene).

8 September 1886: Anatolia College began instruction; Tracy became its first president.

1890-1893: Furlough; George F. Herrick took over the presidency temporarily.

5 January 1893: Placards posted on the college walls.

14 March 1894: The college incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts (White).

15 November 1895: Events in Merzifon; orphanages afterwards established on the premises.

14 April 1899: The Ottoman firman ceremonially presented to Tracy at the college.

1902: College students arrested and tried in Amasya.

1902-1905: Third furlough; White acting president.

September 1913: Preached his last sermon at the college and returned to America.

1914: His resignation took effect at Commencement; elected President Emeritus.

10 May 1916: The college campus requisitioned for military use.

19 April 1917: Died in Los Angeles.

22 April 1917: Buried in Hollywood.

Bibliography

The following sources were used in this article:

Online sources