Ellen M. Stone (1846–1927) was an American Protestant missionary, teacher, and author,[1] stationed in Bulgaria and Macedonia, Turkey.

[2] The circumstances in connection with her capture by brigands, September 3, 1901, on a mountain road in Macedonia, and her subsequent detention by them for nearly six months, pending the payment of her ransom, were given wide newspaper publicity.

[3] On her father's side, Ellen descended from Gregory Stone, who, with his wife Lydia, came from Suffolk, England, about 1636, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Miss Stone also descended, through her maternal grandmother, Lucy Waterman Barker, from the Pilgrim, Captain Myles Standish.

The father enlisted in Company K, Forty-third Massachusetts Infantry, and saw service at Newbern and Little Washington, North Carolina.

There, she began working in the Samakov Girls Boarding School, as assistant to Esther T. Maltbie,[5] teaching English branches, while learning the new language.

[3] After becoming familiar with the language, her field of usefulness widened, as the Board then appointed her superintendent of the "Bible women", who taught in the towns and villages of the country, that younger children (than the pupils at the boarding-school) and their mothers should be reached.

[4] Here, associated with Dr. House and Mr. Baird, Mr. Haskell and their families, Stone carried on a work in that city, which included many conversions among the sailors from the British fleet, anchored for a time in Salonica Harbor.

[7] The Board of Foreign Missions appealed for aid and US$72,500 was obtained and paid over only after the brigands had consented to a month's grace in order to allow additional subscriptions.

Their captors, fearing Turkish soldiers, moved Stone and Tsilka from place to place until, through arrangements with John G. A. Leishman, American Minister at the Sublime Porte, a spot not far from Saloniki was agreed upon where the money was paid and the victims were freed[6] on February 23, 1902.

[4] Most of the ransom money was raised by public subscription in the U.S.[8] Since her return to the U.S. in April 1902, she lived quietly in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Her manuscript and illustrations of a book American Mission Work in the Balkans, concluding with the story of the captivity,[4] were destroyed in the Great Chelsea fire of 1908, on April 12, 1908, with all her belongings.