not establish communities. By the 1770s over 70 Armenians had settled in the colonies. The persecution of Christian minorities under the Ottoman Empire and American missionary activities resulted in a small wave of Armenian migration to the US in the 1830s from Cilicia and Western Armenia. Hatchik (Christopher) Oscanyan, a Constantinople American missionary school student, arrived in America in 1835 to pursue higher education. He later worked for the New York Herald Tribune and became the New York Press Club president. Many Armenians followed him and went to the US for education. During the Civil War three Armenian doctors—Simeon Minasian, Garabed Galstian, and Baronig Matevosian—worked at military hospitals in Philadelphia. The only Armenian known to have participated in hostilities was Khachadour Paul Garabedian, who enlisted in the Union Navy. A naturalized citizen from Rodosto, Garabedian served aboard the blockade ships USS Geranium and USS Grand Gulf as a Third Assistant Engineer and later an officer from 1864 until his honorable discharge from the Navy in August 1865. The number of Armenians rose from 20 in 1854 to around 70 by the 1870s. According to official statistics, 14 Armenians immigrated to the U.S. in 1878. In the late 1870s, small Armenian communities existed in New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, and Worcester, Massachusetts. By the late 1880s, their number reached 1,500. Many of them were young male students of the American Evangelical Missions spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. About 40% came from the Province of Kharpert. Before 1899, immigrants were not classified by ethnicity, but rather by country of birth, obscuring the ethnic origins of many Armenians. After 1869, however, Armenians from the eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire were registered as "Armenian" in American records. The number of Armenians who migrated to the US from 1820 to 1898 is estimated to be around 4,000. First wave of immigration and the Interwar period Armenians began to arrive in the US in unprecedented numbers in the late 19th century, most notably after the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–96, and before, during and after the Armenian genocide. Before this mass migration to the US, the number of Armenians in the country was from 1,500 to 3,000. The New York Times talked of about 10,000 Armenians in the US in 1895. Over 12,000 Armenians from the Ottoman Empire went to the US throughout the 1890s. This period witnessed cultural contact between American and Armenian through