Two girls weave at an upright rug loom. Ghazir, c. 1925.

Item Detail

Near East Relief built its vocational program on the principle that orphans should be trained, not warehoused, and its largest single facility was the orphanage at Ghazir, in the hills above Beirut, run by the Swiss relief worker Dr. Jakob Künzler and his wife, Elisabeth. Ghazir taught carpentry, metalwork, agriculture, and the trade crafts NER expected would make children self-supporting, and Künzler managed one of the largest orphan rug-weaving operations in the Near East, the older girls working at upright looms. The most celebrated of those carpets, the Armenian Orphan Rug, was presented to President Calvin Coolidge in 1925 and passed into the White House collection. Source: The Coolidge rug presentation is documented in Barton, Story of Near East Relief, 1930.)

Context

The Barclay Acheson Collection at the Rockefeller Archive Center holds the personal photographic record of Near East Relief's Director of Overseas Operations from 1925 through 1929. Barclay Acheson (1886–1957) joined NER as Associate General Secretary in 1922 and took charge of relief work across Greece, Syria, and the Caucasus the following year. He was based in Athens after the 1922 Smyrna catastrophe and traveled annually to NER's field operations across the Caucasus, Anatolia, Beirut, and Baghdad. The collection's 1,000-plus photographs include formal NER institutional records and personal snapshots from his inspection trips. The subjects span the Alexandropol orphan city, the Athens Zappeion evacuation, the Ghazir vocational school, and the 1927 Iraq survey trip. The photographs are the visual counterpart to Acheson's contemporaneous diaries; the RAC also holds the diaries, and they are available on the NERHS museum site under Voices of NER — Leadership.

Near East Relief built its vocational program around the principle that orphans should be trained, not warehoused. Its largest single facility was the orphanage at Ghazir, in the hills above Beirut, run by the Swiss relief worker Dr. Jakob Künzler and his wife, Elisabeth, who, at its height, sheltered thousands of Armenian children. Ghazir taught carpentry, metalwork, agriculture, and the trade-school crafts NER expected would turn children into self-supporting adults. Künzler also managed one of the largest orphan rug-weaving operations in the Near East, with work chiefly done by the older girls on upright looms, whose fine carpets were the program's signature product.

The most celebrated of those carpets was the Armenian Orphan Rug, woven by Ghazir orphan girls and presented to President Calvin Coolidge in 1925 as a gift of thanks from the Armenian people. Known since as the "White House rug," it passed into the White House collection. A curator's note of "White House Rug" attaches to one of the photographs in this collection — a large carpet hung from the orphanage roof — which may show that rug, or a companion piece, raised for the camera before shipment.

The Ghazir photographs in the Acheson collection document this work directly: girls at the upright looms, finished carpets held up by their weavers, and the great rugs draped from the orphanage walls and roofs. They record NER's shift from emergency relief to sustainable development that Paul Monroe and the 1924 survey commission formalized.