Caleb Wakefield Lawrence

Caleb Wakefield Lawrence (1868–1939) was born in Wilton, Maine, the seventh of eight children of the Reverend John Lawrence and Nancy Temple Wakefield. His mother died when he was two, and his childhood was spent among relatives. In 1896, at twenty-seven, he sailed for Smyrna as a teacher under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, joining his elder sister Clara on the faculty of the boys' school that would soon become the International College of Smyrna. He earned an M.A. in History and Literature from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1909, completing his coursework by correspondence and taking his furlough on the campus. In 1904, he married Helen Lewis, whom he had met at the schools in Smyrna; they had seven children.

From 1915 to 1917, he was confidential secretary at the United States Consulate General in Smyrna, in the period when the American consulate carried the protecting interests of Britain, France, Italy, and other belligerent governments. When the Ottoman Empire severed diplomatic relations with the United States in April 1917, the consular post in Smyrna closed, and Lawrence returned to the United States with his family. Later that year, he went to France as a field secretary with the YMCA's Foyers du Soldat, where he and his French colleagues reestablished more than forty soldiers' canteens behind the lines after the German Spring offensive.

Returning to Smyrna in 1919 as a commissioned American Board missionary, he was appointed Director of the Near East Relief Smyrna Unit in 1920. After the burning of Smyrna in September 1922, he was named Chairman of the Smyrna Disaster Relief Committee, leading American relief efforts across western Anatolia and the adjacent islands until the committee was wound up in June 1923. He continued at the College and with Near East Relief through the decade that followed.

His leadership of the Smyrna relief was formally commended by Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner at Constantinople, in February 1924. The Lawrences retired in 1933 and settled on the family farm in Norton, Massachusetts, where he died in 1939.