Collections
Coombs names Lawrence NER Smyrna director, May 26, 1920
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1920
Item Detail
'Without too much interference with your college work': May 1920 — the NER Constantinople office hands Lawrence the directorship of the Smyrna Unit on top of his International College teaching.
Context
Caleb Wakefield Lawrence (1868–1939) taught at International College, Smyrna for nearly four decades and led American humanitarian relief operations in the eastern Mediterranean after the First World War. He was born in Wilton, Maine, and arrived in Smyrna in 1896 under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He joined the boys' school that, in 1903, became the International College under Alexander MacLachlan. The family lived at Paradise (Kızılçullu), a few miles south of Smyrna, where the College moved its campus in 1912. From April 1915 to April 1917, he served as confidential secretary at the U.S. Consulate-General in Smyrna under George Horton. When Americans were expelled from Ottoman Turkey in 1917, he returned to the United States with his family, and in early 1918, he joined the YMCA's Foyers du Soldat in France, where he ran soldiers' canteens behind the lines through the closing year of the war.
In February 1919, the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE) jointly commissioned him and his wife, Helen Lewis Lawrence — a nurse trained in London — for service in Western Asia. In May 1920, Near East Relief named him Director of its Smyrna Unit. After the burning of Smyrna in September 1922, he chaired the Smyrna Disaster Relief Committee of the Constantinople Chapter of the American Red Cross, which ran U.S. refugee, evacuation, and supply operations across western Anatolia and the adjacent islands of Mytilene, Chios, and Samos until its dissolution on June 30, 1923. He and Helen continued at the College and with Near East Relief until his retirement in 1933. They raised their seven children in Smyrna.
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Holding Institution
Rockefeller Archive Center
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External Link
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Attribution
Caleb Wakefield Lawrence Papers, Near East Relief Foundation Special Collections, Series 3, Rockfeller Archive Center
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Rights
No known copyright restrictions. Based on available information, NERHS is not aware of copyright restrictions on this material. Items are presented for non-commercial research and educational use. Users are responsible for determining rights status and compliance with applicable law.
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Notes
This item is part of the Caleb Wakefield Lawrence and Helen Lewis Lawrence Papers — correspondence and administrative records that document Lawrence's relief work in Smyrna and the eastern Mediterranean in the years after the First World War.
The collection's center of gravity is Lawrence's chairmanship of the Smyrna Disaster Relief Committee — an American Red Cross relief body that coordinated with Near East Relief and other U.S. agencies and operated across Smyrna, its immediate hinterland, and the adjacent islands of Mytilene, Chios, and Samos after the burning of Smyrna and the refugee catastrophe of the Greek and Armenian Genocides in September 1922.
Surrounding that core are: late-1918 YMCA and Foyers du Soldat correspondence from Paris on Lawrence's recall to Smyrna; the February 14, 1919 American Committee for Relief in the Near East certificates that commission Caleb and Helen Lawrence for service in Western Asia; a run of appointment, authorization, banking, and financial closeout records (1919–1921); correspondence with senior NER leadership including James L. Barton; U.S. diplomatic and consular materials including Admiral Mark L. Bristol; and 1923–1924 documents that address Lawrence as Near East Relief's representative in post-fire Smyrna.
Three further threads stand out: the Khedivial Mail correspondence from Alexandria, which traces Lawrence's return of refugee survivors to their families in the year after the fire; Lawrence's own voice, in his twelve-page pencilled finding aid for the SDRC papers and his Missionary Herald article "The Message of the Church at Smyrna"; and a December 1930 letter from H.C. Jaquith that accompanied NER's gift of The Story of Near East Relief to the International College library.
The papers were donated by Mike Smith, Lawrence's grandson, to NERHS in June 2021 and are now held by the Rockefeller Archive Center as Series 3 of the Near East Foundation records (finding aid FA1305).
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Document Contents
Typed letter on Near East Relief, 13 Rue Petits-Champs, Constantinople letterhead, Constantinople, May 26th, 1920. From: Managing Director, N.E.R., Constantinople; To: Prof. C.W. Lawrence, N.E.R., Smyrna; Subject: Appointment. Signed J.P. Coombs, Managing Director (initialed JPC/S). Writes that upon the departure of Mr. Reed, Lawrence will assume the directorship of the Smyrna Unit and will endeavor to close out the work as outlined in an enclosed letter to Mr. Reed (not in the present file). Thanks Lawrence for past work and hopes the new duties can be taken on "without too much interference with your college work."