Wool Dept: Inspecting and weighing raw wool

Item Detail

Inspecting and weighing raw wool. ACASR Wool Dept., Caucasus.

Context

Ernest Alfred Yarrow (1876–1939) was a British-born, American-raised missionary who served in the Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus, first for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and later for Near East Relief. Sent to Van in 1904 to run the mission’s schools, he lived through the 1915 massacres and the month-long siege of the city, helping organize its wartime governance and relief before escaping with Armenian refugees across the border into the Russian Caucasus. He returned to direct relief in the region and, from 1920 to 1925, served as Director General of Near East Relief’s Caucasus branch; during that tenure he oversaw care for some 30,000 Armenian children and organized public-works employment—street-cleaning and irrigation projects—for roughly 150,000 refugees.

Compiled ca. 1918–1919, this album of 104 captioned photographs documents American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR) work-relief and welfare operations around Erevan (Yerevan) and Etchmiadzin, serving survivors displaced from Van, Bitlis, and neighboring provinces. The prints are grouped by department—Wool, Cotton, Bedding, Weaving, Clothing, Carpenter, Home Orphan, and Employment—and follow a single production cycle: raw materials gathered and processed, piecework done in refugees’ homes, and finished blankets and clothing returned for distribution. The album also records widows’ allowances, orphan registries, and medical clinics. Assembled to account to donors in the United States, it documents a deliberate effort to put displaced people into paid, productive work rather than sustain them by direct relief alone.