Bayard Dodge Photographs (1922)

Bayard Dodge (1888–1972) joined the faculty of the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut, in 1913 and served as the university’s president from 1923 to 1948. The son of Cleveland H. Dodge, Near East Relief’s founding treasurer, he helped organize the agency’s work in Syria and Lebanon after the First World War. In April 1921, he negotiated French Mandate permission to move orphans from Marash (Kahramanmaras) and Urfa (Sanliurfa) southward to safety.

This album contains 221 mounted photographs and accompanying inscriptions from 1921 and 1922. Read as a whole, it documents the closing phase and immediate aftermath of the Armenian Genocide. The French withdrawal from Cilicia in late 1921 forced tens of thousands of Armenian survivors into Syria. The Turkish Nationalist victory in 1922 brought another emergency as Near East Relief removed children from Marash, Urfa, Mardin, Diarbekir, Aintab, Aleppo, and Harpout. The album shows refugee camps at Alexandretta, Cilician families in temporary shelters in Beirut, children transported by truck, riverboat, and steamship, and new institutions prepared to receive them. Although Armenian orphans and refugees predominate, the album also records Greek orphans, Syrian and Arab children, and adult Cilician refugees.

Most of the photographs document the receiving network that Near East Relief constructed across Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Estates, mission buildings, factories, barracks, and an old paper mill became orphanages at Sidon, Ghazir, Jebail (Byblos), Antilyas, Nahr Ibrahim, Aleppo, Homs, and Jerusalem. Schools, clinics, kitchens, workshops, staff, and transport systems supported the children after evacuation. A December 1922 album card accounts for approximately 10,740 children in the Beirut-area institutions alone. The collection records the point at which emergency rescue became long-term resettlement and permanent exile.

The original album is held by the American University of Beirut; the Near East Foundation holds digital surrogates and parallel rights to the volume.

Sources and provenance: Original photographs and inscriptions from the Bayard Dodge album, Volume IV. Near East Relief’s own periodicals supply dates, names, and published captions: the News Bulletin, the Newsletter, and The New Near East, which printed photographs from this album in “A Flight of Children,” November 1922. For the Beirut headquarters and the movements of 1922, see Nellie Miller Mann, Letters from Syria 1921–1923, transcribed and edited by David W. Mann. Personnel are identified against the roll in James L. Barton, Story of Near East Relief (1930). Additional sources are cited in the individual photograph records.