Harold C. Jaquith Collection

Harold C. Jaquith directed Near East Relief’s operations in Constantinople (Istanbul) from April 1921, with oversight of 180,000 orphans and refugees in the city and its hinterland. A Presbyterian minister educated at Trinity College, Columbia University, and Union Theological Seminary, he first toured the Near East in 1919, when American relief columns were reaching survivors of the Armenian Genocide in the Caucasus. After the Turkish Nationalist army burned Smyrna (Izmir) in September 1922, Jaquith made an emergency tour of the refugee centers, counted some 400,000 people in flight, and publicly criticized the Allied fleets that would not carry them. From 1923, he helped direct the resettlement that followed the Greek-Turkish population exchange, and Greece made him a Commander of the Order of King George I.

The photographs in this collection follow that career. They show the orphan city at Alexandropol (Gyumri) and the famine winters in the Caucasus: outdoor clinics, ration lines in the snow, boys in flour-sack clothing, haystacks bought with donated American old clothes. They show the evacuations that carried orphans by rail through Batum and Tiflis and by sea to Greece, and the church bell Greek refugees carried out of Transcaucasia. In Greece they record the new Near East Relief headquarters in Athens, visits by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau and Governor Henry J. Allen of Kansas, and the villages where refugee families rebuilt. A small group documents the orphanage at Aintoura, Lebanon.

Jaquith’s daughter, Betty Jaquith, donated her father’s photographs and correspondence to the Near East Foundation, NER’s legal successor. Many prints carry period annotations on the back in the family’s hand; these supplied the names and places in the records that follow. The prints are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center.