Helen Lawrence

Helen Lewis (1877–1963) was born in Smyrna in 1877, the granddaughter of the Reverend William Bucknor Lewis — a British missionary who with his wife had come to Smyrna in 1832 to serve its Jewish community, and who served as British chaplain of the city from 1843 to 1848. As a young woman she was sent to London to train as a nurse, and on her return joined the staff of the American Mission School for Girls in Smyrna. She met Caleb Wakefield Lawrence, then teaching at the boys’ school across town, at an afternoon tea between the two schools; they were engaged in the winter of 1897 and were married in 1904 in Egypt, where her widowed mother had settled with several of her children. The Lawrences had seven children.

For the next three decades, alongside raising her family, Helen served the wider American mission and relief effort in Smyrna. During the years of the First World War, before the United States entered the conflict, she ran a daily soup kitchen at the family home for destitute neighbors. In February 1919, she was formally appointed to the relief expedition of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East and on returning to Smyrna with Caleb later that year she was commissioned as a full missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in her own right.

When Smyrna burned in September 1922, Helen was evacuated from the International College by American sailors on the thirteenth — the day after the fire began — carrying her seven-month-old daughter Dorothy with her. She returned with the family the following year and remained at Caleb’s side through the decade of relief and academic work that followed.

The Lawrences retired in 1933 and settled on the family farm in Norton, Massachusetts. After Caleb’s death in 1939 Helen lived a further twenty-four years; she died on December 30, 1963, at the age of eighty-six.