Orphan boys with the imported American stock at Syra orphanage

Item Detail

Boys stand among cattle and pigs at a watering place on the orphanage farm. The animals came from the United States. Near East Relief's agricultural committee shipped poultry in 1926, then pigs, then fifteen head of cattle on the steamer Eureka in 1927, the Jerseys consigned to Syra. Fred Midgley's own account of the farmyard is in the scrapbook: all he had to do now was let nature take its course and multiply some good stock, which would help Greece a lot.

Context

Fred Midgley (1865–1939) was born in England and brought to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1869 at the age of four. He and Carrie A. Midgley, formerly Carrie A. Bancroft, ran a market garden and were long active in the Grange. Near East Relief wanted an American market gardener to take charge of the farm work at its orphanage on the island of Syra, and Fred Midgley signed a two-year agreement in August 1926. The couple sailed that September and served until 1928, he directing the agricultural work and she assisting him. The children there were survivors of the Armenian and Greek genocides and of the destruction of Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922. Near East Relief's own history calls Syra the last of its orphanage centers.

This photograph is one of a group of loose prints the family kept alongside their two scrapbook albums. They show the orphanage buildings and farm, the children and the American staff, and several carry inscriptions on the back naming individual children. Nancy Winter Taylor, their granddaughter, gave the papers to the Near East Foundation. They are held in the Near East Foundation records at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Accession 2012:071, RG 6, FA 1309.