Collections
Edward Tyler Perry, Letters from the Caucasus, 1919–1920
Location
Karaklis (Vanadzor), Armenia
Year
1919–1920
Item Detail
The collected letters and diary extracts of American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE) worker Edward Tyler Perry — the U.S.T. Leviathan voyage of February 1919, his relief district at Karaklis, and the Armenian refugee and orphanage work around Alexandropol, Erivan, and Igdir.
Context
Edward Tyler Perry, a Williams College graduate and U.S. Army veteran of the First World War, sailed from Hoboken aboard the U.S.T. Leviathan on February 15, 1919, among the roughly 250 relief workers of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, reorganized as Near East Relief in 1919).
Assigned to the Caucasus, he ran a relief district based at Karaklis (Karakilisse; now Vanadzor), some twenty miles east of Alexandropol (Gyumri), and worked across the refugee and orphanage stations of Alexandropol, Erivan (Yerevan), and Igdir during the famine that followed the Armenian Genocide and the collapse of Russian rule in the Caucasus. He served through 1919 and into 1920 in the fragile first Republic of Armenia, returning to New York in May 1920.
His letters home to his mother, Anna Morris Perry, with extracts from his diary, describe the pioneering ACRNE expedition day by day: the Atlantic crossing, Constantinople, and the starving refugees and orphaned children of the Armenian plateau. The text is a family transcription — Anna Morris Perry compiled the letters and interpolated diary passages into a typescript, of which onion-skin carbon copies passed to the family; it was digitally transcribed by W. Scott Gain in 2007 and lightly corrected in 2026.
The original letters have not been located, and the family notes that omissions or typographical errors may have entered during compilation, so the text should be read as a faithful but uncollated transcription.
-
Holding Institution
Private collection (Perry family) — originals not located
-
Attribution
Edward Tyler Perry Letters. Gift of the Perry family to the Near East Foundation, 2026.
-
Rights
Presented by permission. Cleared for display under donor license (Deed of Gift, Gale Eaton, June 2026). The Perry family retains ownership of the original materials and has granted the Near East Foundation a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, display, archive, share, modify, adapt, and create derivative works from the digital files for educational, research, historical, and archival purposes, including digital publication and exhibition.
-
Notes
Manuscript history (per donor Gale Eaton): Edward Perry wrote letters to his mother, Anna Morris Perry, and kept a diary; Mrs. Perry transcribed the letters and inserted diary passages; onion-skin carbon copies were produced (one per grandchild); photocopies are held by Catherine Perry Gain; W. Scott Gain digitally transcribed and collated them in 2007; Gale Eaton corrected further typos in 2026. Originals not located and may not survive; text is uncollated against originals.
-
Document Contents
Excerpt — Letter No. 12, Erivan, Armenia, April 16, 1919:
“I left Alexandropol with Miss Blanche Knox about 2 o'clock this afternoon. We sat in the train at the station for about two hours before we finally started, surrounded by a pitiful throng of starved refugees, mostly children of 8 to 12 years, with the faces of little old men, continually crying and begging for food. When a bit of bread is thrown out, the whole crowd immediately fight for it like wild beasts — survival of the fittest. It is impossible to describe their condition — pinched, drawn faces, discolored and disfigured by inconceivable suffering — shivering and shaking in their scanty rags which were almost no protection from the bitter winds which swept down from the snow-covered mountains.”