Caleb Wakefield Lawrence Papers (1918–1930)

Caleb Wakefield Lawrence (1868–1939) directed Near East Relief’s Smyrna Unit from May 1920 and chaired the American Red Cross’s Smyrna Disaster Relief Committee from September 1922. An American Board missionary teacher at International College, Smyrna (Izmir) since 1896, he and his wife, Helen Lewis Lawrence — a nurse trained in London — were jointly commissioned by the American Committee for Relief in the Near East in February 1919 for relief service in Western Asia. After the Turkish Nationalist army burned Smyrna in September 1922, the Smyrna Disaster Relief Committee ran American refugee, evacuation, and supply operations across western Anatolia and the adjacent islands of Mytilene, Chios, and Samos until its dissolution on June 30, 1923.

The papers in this collection follow that arc. Late-1918 letters record Lawrence’s recall from France to Smyrna. February 1919 ACRNE certificates commission Caleb and Helen. A run of appointment, authorization, and financial records traces the first NER Smyrna Unit through 1921. Nothing in those letters hints that, within a year, the city would burn and Lawrence would chair one of NER’s largest emergency operations to that date.

The Smyrna Disaster Relief Committee cluster anchors the collection: Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol’s three-page charter, H.C. Jaquith’s wax-sealed Near East Relief credential, Lawrence’s twelve-page penciled finding aid, L.N. Lazardo’s survivor letter from Athens, and the printed June 1923 ARC Monthly Bulletin. A 1924 thread in the Khedivial Mail correspondence from Alexandria documents Lawrence’s return of the refugee child Evangelia Petridou to her mother in Egypt, and a December 1930 letter from H.C. Jaquith closes the run with Near East Relief’s gift of The Story of Near East Relief to the International College library.

Mike Smith, Lawrence’s grandson, donated his grandfather’s papers to NERHS in June 2021. The Rockefeller Archive Center holds the originals as Series 3 of the Near East Foundation records (finding aid FA1305).