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Mary Louise Graffam (1871–1921) was born in the small town of Monson, Maine, graduated from Oberlin College in 1894, and became a teacher. Influenced by her sister and her brother-in-law, Graffam decided to become a missionary and in 1901 was dispatched by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions as a missionary and educator to Sivas, Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire). She was soon named head of female education and, within a year, principal of the girls’ high school in Sivas, with the direct charge of about 200 students. Sivas was a city in central Anatolian Turkey with a substantial Christian population, 15,000 of whom were Armenians.