Death of Cyrus Hamlin (August 8, 1900)

Cyrus Hamlin was a prominent American Congregational missionary and co-founder of Robert College in Constantinople. 

Hamlin was born in Waterford, Maine, on January 8, 1811. He belonged to a prominent nineteenth-century family in the state. At sixteen, he entered an apprenticeship as a silversmith and jeweler in Portland, Maine, before deciding to enter the ministry. He first attended Bridgton Academy before heading to college. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1834 and from Bangor Theological Seminary in 1837.  

Hamlin married Henrietta Jackson in 1838 and they left the United States in the same year for the Ottoman Empire as a missionary under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He helped found Bebek Seminary in 1840 as part of his outreach to Armenians and directed it until 1860. He resigned from the mission in 1860 over disputes with fellow missionaries and the leadership of the American Board concerning his philosophy of education and highly successful “secular labors” to raise money for student support. Hamlin established a workshop at Bebek to teach his students marketable trades, to help alleviate their severe poverty. The funds earned by Hamlin’s enterprises, including a successful baking business, helped build thirteen Protestant Armenian churches in Turkey.  

In 1860 he began the work of establishing Robert College (predecessor to Bogazici University). He was eventually granted an imperial order granting permission for the school to be built and permitting it to be under American protection. The school opened its doors on May 15, 1863. Hamlin served as its president until 1873. He returned to the United States, where he later served as professor of dogmatic theology at Bangor Theological Seminary (1877-1880).  

He was elected president of Middlebury College in Vermont from 1880 until his retirement to Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1885. His guidance brought the College back from the brink of collapse and began a recovery process that would ultimately lead to unprecedented growth in the early years of the past century. The most significant event of his administration was the college’s decision to accept women in 1883.  

Hamlin published Among the Turks (1878) and My Life and Times (1893). In the last years of his life, he denounced forcefully the Armenian massacres organized by Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1894-1896. He passed away on August 8, 1900, and he is buried in Lexington. Hamlin Hall at Boğaziçi University (formerly part of Robert College), as well as Hamlin Hall in Middlebury College’s Freeman International Center are named after him.