MS-135 Alice Griffith Carr Papers

Access and Provenance

Series Listing

Biographical Sketch

Alice graduated from Antioch in 1904, and after teaching high school in West Mansfield, Ohio and working as a beautician in Georgia, she enrolled in the Johns Hopkins Nurses Training School in Baltimore, graduating in 1914. Carr then joined the first contingent of American Red Cross nurses to see service in World War I. She sailed for France in June, 1917 and was attached to a base hospital near Verdun for two years. It was the beginning of her long and distinguished career in nursing and public health in Europe and Asia, and except for a few brief furloughs home, she remained abroad until 1941.

Carr stayed on with the Red Cross after her release from the base hospital and served in Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, Smyrna, Czechoslovakia, and Syria during the early 1920's. In 1923 while stationed in Greece, she joined the staff of the Near East Foundation, an American philanthropic organization working to aid nearly a million Greek refugees who had been driven from Turkey after the World War. She spent the next 22 years working for the Near East Foundation, and in the 1930's, served as the foundation's Director of Public Health in Greece.

During her tenure in Greece, Carr received international attention for her skillful organizing and tireless work fighting typhus, malaria, and tuberculosis, establishing child welfare and medical service centers, and teaching refugee women home industries and sanitation. She was three times decorated by the Greek government, and in 1937, returned home briefly to receive several honors including LL.D degrees from Ohio State University and her alma mater, Antioch. By the late 1930's, Alice Carr was being written of as "one of the world's best known women."

In the fall of 1941, the Nazi army occupied Greece and all Americans were expelled. Carr returned to New York City to be the Advisor in Public Health for the Near East Foundation. During the closing years of World War II, she traveled widely and lectured for the Foundation before going home to Yellow Springs to retire. In 1948, she joined the Melbourne Village Community in Florida. There she designed and supervised the construction of her new home, gardened extensively, raised chinchillas and bees, rented rooms to tourists, and was very active in the affairs of the community. She died in 1968 at the age of 81.

Scope and Content

The rest of the correspondence series consists of letters written to Alice Carr from various family members and friends. It is arranged so that major correspondents are given their own file folders while the remainder of the letters are arranged chronologically. Span dates for the entire series are 1901-1968.

Series 2, Red Cross Materials, and Series 3, Near East Foundation Materials, contain correspondence, reports, journal articles, and personnel papers connected with Carr's professional life and work for these two organizations. The most interesting materials are the reports she wrote for the Near East Foundation concerning rural medical cooperatives, village rehabilitation, public health, sanitation, and disease control. Balkan Journal, An Unofficial Observer in Greece written in 1944 by Laird Archer, the Foreign Director of the Near East Foundation, is included in Series 3 and contains many references to Carr's work in Greece. Series 2 covers the years 1917-1944, and Series 3, 1926-1947.

Series 4 is a miscellaneous collection of Carr's personal papers and includes biographical and genealogical materials, newspaper clippings, her will and death certificate, files on various organizations, a file on Melbourne Village Community and some of her projects there, a file of grade reports from Antioch, a short story she wrote in 1903, and her collection of passports and visas. Materials in this series cover the years 1898-1968.

The Lizzie B. Schilling Estate Papers, Series 5, consists of legal documents pertaining to Alice Carr's cousin who died in 1948. Carr was the executor of the estate and the papers have mainly genealogical value because they trace the ancestry of Carr's paternal grandmother, Sophronia Thomas Carr, in order to establish heirs of the estate. This series also contains Lizzie Schilling's diaries from 1918-1926 which give an insight into the routine life of a Springfield (Ohio) housewife during the period.

The photographs in Series 6 are arranged into several categories including portraits, family photographs, France and World War I, Greece, Florida, and trips. The photographs date from around 1905 until the mid 1960's.

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