In June 1923, Emma Cushman stepped off a boat at Corinth with thousands of children in her care. Half had caught malaria during the evacuation from Anatolia. The town receiving them, a sleepy port of six thousand, was almost as sick as the children. The seven years that followed would prove what two American nurses, a sympathetic Greek government, and an army of teenage orphans with picks and spades could accomplish.
Dispatches
In the Footsteps of a Saint: Life at Corinth Orphanage
Corinth girls carrying water for the Saturday clean-up, 1926.
A Nation’s Generosity
When Near East Relief worker Emma Cushman came to Corinth, Greece, in June 1923, she brought a few friends: 2,700 friends, to be specific.
Cushman’s charges were evacuees from Near East Relief orphanages across the Turkish interior. She herself had managed the orphanage at Konia. As hostilities shifted across Anatolia, Greece had opened its doors to 17,000 Near East Relief orphans in 1922 and accepted tens of thousands of refugees besides. Greek generosity toward orphans and refugees was essential to Near East Relief’s work, and it began a collaboration with the Greek government that would continue for decades after Near East Relief became the Near East Foundation in 1930.
The Greek government granted Near East Relief the right to open orphanages and worked with NER leadership to choose the best possible sites for raising and educating the children. Some locations were chosen for convenience. The enormous Zappeion Exhibition Hall in Athens offered size, and the farm school at Oropos converted easily to an orphanage focused on agricultural training.
Miss Emma Cushman with girls of the Konia Orphanage.
Orphans at play in the ancient Roman bath, Old Corinth, 1927.
The Fountain of Peirene today.
A Spiritual Home
Corinth offered practical benefits and spiritual significance for Near East Relief’s leaders. Like Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia, Corinth had an underused military base that could be adapted for orphanage use with relative ease, and its small port and proximity to Athens would help with orphan transport. The town sat about two miles northeast of ancient Corinth, once a metropolis of 90,000. According to the Christian Bible, the Apostle Paul founded the Christian church there, and his letters to the Corinthians became part of the New Testament.
A devastating earthquake leveled the ancient city in 1858. A new town soon took shape on the sunny shores of the Gulf of Corinth.
The “new Corinth” of 1923 was a far cry from the bustling city of Classical times. Emma Cushman found herself in a sleepy coastal town of 6,000 residents. Nearly all of them were debilitated by malaria. Half of her 2,700 charges were ill by the time they arrived. Many of the children had tuberculosis and favus on top of the malaria they had acquired during the evacuation. Malaria had also taken hold in Corinth’s refugee community, which was home to nearly 400 Armenian and Greek families that had fled Turkey.
Orphans digging drainage ditches at Corinth, c. 1923–1924.
Fighting Malaria in Corinth
Emma Cushman was a trained nurse, but the Corinthian malaria epidemic was more than she and her colleagues could handle. The orphanage staff consisted of Cushman, one American doctor, three Greek doctors, three American nurses, and twenty Greek nurses. Malaria plagued the staff, and many left the area out of concern for their own health. The future of the Corinth Orphanage did not look promising.
Help arrived in the form of Alice Carr, an American Red Cross nurse who had served throughout Europe. She joined Near East Relief in Greece in 1923.
Carr drew up an ambitious anti-malaria plan that would benefit the orphanage and the surrounding community alike. She traced the epidemic to the local swamps, where standing water bred disease-carrying mosquitoes. Carr enlisted 92 older orphans to drain the swamps. Two squadrons of soldiers on loan from the Greek military soon joined them. Together, they dug 100 miles of drainage ditches to dry out the dangerous marshes.
A Healthy Life for All
When that project was complete, Carr personally inspected every backyard, marsh, and irrigation ditch within a three-mile radius of the orphanage. Her staff of sanitation workers visited 300 homes per day. They encouraged farmers to cover irrigation reservoirs and eliminate standing water. Carr also opened a clinic to care for locals suffering from malaria. Near East Relief administered 5,000 doses of quinine to orphans and refugees per day. Within a year, Carr had eradicated malaria in the orphanage and the surrounding community.
The governor of the Argos-Corinth district could not help but be impressed. In her own account, Cushman credited Carr with rousing the local government to enforce sanitation laws passed in 1836 that had long since fallen into disuse — laws requiring streets, pavements, houses, and gardens to be cleaned frequently and thoroughly.
Alice G. Carr, NER nurse
The Tuberculosis Hospital
In 1924, the Corinth Orphanage opened a specialized hospital for Near East Relief orphans with tuberculosis. The hospital followed the sanatorium model, which emphasized fresh air, sunshine, and nutritious food. The building was used only in severe weather. Patients spent all of their time outdoors as part of the “sun bath” treatment. Instead of the usual orphanage uniform, the sick children wore loincloths to make the most of the sun. They even slept in outdoor pavilions.
The young tuberculosis patients had a recreation yard of their own. Alongside the more sedate pursuits of reading and basket weaving, they were encouraged to work in the garden and play games.
Classes in girls' dormitory - Corinth, Greece.
DAILY LIFE
Between the medical emergencies, the orphanage ran as a working institution. In her own account, Cushman pointed to the orphanage’s system of self-government — its juvenile court, its leagues, its schoolroom methods, and what she called “its wholesome domestic life” — as the framework that made everything else possible. Children went to school every day, studied in classrooms set up in the dormitories, worked in the gardens, and trained in trades. A Near East Relief booklet from these years declared the program’s ambition plainly: every orphan would go to school, and there would be no illiterates among the graduates.
Courtyard at the Corinth Orphanage
In 1928, a series of earthquakes struck Corinth. Twenty Boy Scouts from the orphanage acted as first responders. They spent twenty-two days in the heavily damaged city. They searched for survivors, distributed supplies, and built temporary shelters.
By 1930, the Corinth Orphanage had closed. Both Alice Carr and Emma Cushman remained in Greece, their adopted homeland. Carr became the Near East Foundation’s Director of Public Health in Greece. Cushman began building a house between Corinth and Athens, where she planned a poultry training operation. In December 1930, she traveled to Cairo to spend Christmas with some of her former orphans. While there, malaria recurred. She died in Egypt and was buried in Cairo, attended by just a few of the girls she had raised from childhood to young adulthood.
Miss Cushman watches a boy paint the Corinthian Canal.
Acheson's June 3, 1926 diary entry on his Corinth visit.
A Second Witness, 1926
On Thursday, June 3, 1926 — his thirty-ninth birthday — Barclay Acheson drove from Athens to Corinth with Dr. Paul Monroe to inspect the orphanage Cushman had been running for three years. Acheson found the schools “of a high order,” the kindergarten “of a very high order,” and the orphanage as a whole markedly improved over the past two years. On Carr’s anti-malaria campaign, he was direct: the demonstration of clearing Corinth of malaria was, he wrote, “really splendid” — the disease was “wiped out.” Cushman told him she planned to close Corinth within a year and retire to a poultry farm she was already building between Corinth and Athens.