Olive Crawford †

Olive T. Crawford and her husband Lyndon went out to Trebizond (Trabzon) in 1879 for the American Board, the Congregational mission society that ran most of the American schools and hospitals in Ottoman Turkey. They were still there forty years later. After the Armenian Genocide, the Crawfords fed and sheltered the orphans and refugees left in the city. Lyndon Crawford died at Trebizond on 26 September 1918. His widow stayed on alone, worked in the Near East Relief orphanage, and for several months before her own death ran the organization's work in the city.

She was feeding Greek and Armenian refugees who had been driven out of the Turkish interior and were waiting at Trebizond for ships to Greece. Typhus was moving through them. The disease travels by body lice and spreads fastest where people are packed together and cannot wash. Crawford caught it and died of typhus at Trebizond on 9 April 1922. The Greek government awarded her the War Cross posthumously the following year, one of five Americans honored at Athens on American Memorial Day 1923.