"Patrick, Mary Mills1850╨1940missionary and educatorBorn on March 10, 1850, in Canterbury, New Hampshire, Mary Patrick grew up there, in North Boscawen, and from 1865 in Lyons (now part of Clinton), Iowa. Learning was encouraged in her home, and in 1869 she graduated from the Lyons Collegiate Institute. In 1871 she accepted appointment by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions as a teacher in a mission school in Erzurum in what is now eastern Turkey. In her four years there she learned ancient and modern Armenian and traveled some 3,000 miles on horseback through the region. In 1875 she was transferred to the American High School for Girls (also known as the Home School) in Scutari (åskƒdar), an Asiatic suburb of Constantinople. She became co-principal of the school in 1883 and sole principal in 1889. During her summers she lived in Greek villages, adding that language and Turkish to her others. After a study furlough in the United States she received a master╒s degree from the University of Iowa in 1890. In that year, after much planning and the securing of a charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the American High School became the American College for Girls at Constantinople, later known as Constantinople Woman╒s College. Patrick served as president of the college from its opening. Summer study at the universities of Heidelberg, Zurich, Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, and Oxford led to her receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Bern in 1897. Her dissertation was published in 1899 as Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism. Prompted by a destructive fire in 1905, the college acquired a new site in ArnavutkÜyƒ on the European side of the Bosporus. A new charter in 1908 ended the college╒s ties to the mission board, and in 1914 the new campus was occupied. Dr. Patrick kept the school open through the Balkan Wars, the Turkish revolution, and World War I, and through those changes it evolved from a school primarily for minority Greek, Armenian, and Bulgarian Christian women into a leading center of higher education for Turkish women. She remained president until her retirement in 1924, after which she lived in New York City and from 1932 in Palo Alto, California. Others of her books were Sappho and the Island of Lesbos, 1912, and, in retirement, The Greek Skeptics, 1929, Under Five Sultans, an autobiography, 1929, and A Bosporus Adventure, a history of the college, 1934. She died in Palo Alto, California, on February 25, 1940. The American College for Girls later affiliated with nearby Robert College for men. vstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ 7 !I 5¬ !I !I 1 !I ┘ !I ° !I !I & !I . !I @ !I ^ !I r !I u !I v !I link `
