Harry C. Moffett Collection (1921–1924)

Harry Clement Moffett (1879–1950) served with the YMCA in France in 1918 and in Poland in 1920 and 1921, and joined Near East Relief in Romania in February 1921. That spring the organization made him director of its unit at Ismid (Izmit), the ancient Nicomedia at the head of the gulf, where he stayed through the Greek army’s withdrawal in June 1921. In August 1922, he took charge of the orphanage work at Sivas, and in 1923 he moved children and refugees to Greece. He returned to the United States in May 1924 and served as publicity director for Near East Relief.

The collection includes 114 photographs and postcards, most made between 1921 and 1924. Ninety-three carry Moffett’s own writing on the back, often at length and in the first person. Read together, they follow one relief worker through three emergencies: the evacuation of Ismid in June 1921, the wagon convoys that carried the children of Sivas over the mountains to the Black Sea in the winter of 1922, and the movement of orphans and refugees into Greece in 1923.

Moffett photographed the Ismid hospital on its opening day in May 1921, children bathed and clothed from the relief stores, and the quay that June, when the town’s entire Christian population and thirty thousand refugees from outside it crowded onto the boats. He also photographed Armenian girls whom Near East Relief had recovered from Arab households after the deportations of the Armenian Genocide, in a play the children staged themselves about the years they had spent there. At Sivas, two hundred and fifty miles inland, he sent convoys out daily for two months, each facing a twelve-day crossing of the snow-covered mountains on which, he wrote, many children died. In Greece, the children were housed in the Zappeion exhibition hall at Athens, in a requisitioned summer resort at Edipsos (Aidipsos) and in a camp on Syra (Syros).

The original photographs are held by the Little Traverse History Museum in Petoskey, Michigan, the town where Moffett settled in later life. The museum shared the digital images with the Near East Relief Historical Society.

Sources and provenance: Moffett’s own inscriptions on the photographs, shared with the digital images by the Little Traverse History Museum. Near East Relief’s staff newsletter for 1921 and 1922 supplies his postings, the evacuation of Ismid and the move of the orphanage to the Bosphorus. Team Work, the staff paper, summarized his service in June 1924, and The New Near East reported the Ismid work in September 1921. Esther Pohl Lovejoy places him at the Makronisi quarantine camp in Certain Samaritans (1927). 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.