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Helen Davenport Gibbons
JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND LECTURER
In a letter to her mother from Tarsus, dated April 15, 1909, Helen
Davenport Gibbons wrote, “They (the Armenians) are terror-stricken,
and have reason to be. How would you like to live in a country where
you knew your Government not only would not protect you, but would
periodically incite your neighbors to rob and kill you with the
help of the army?”1 She made known the facts
of the massacres that she herself witnessed in Tarsus and Adana
in a book entitled, The Red Rugs
of Tarsus, a series of letters in which she chronicled her
and her husband’s (Herbert Adams Gibbons) first hand experiences.
The book was written in 1917 and the following year was translated
into French under the title, Les Turcs Ont Passé; Par
La! Journal D’une Americaine Pendant Les Massacres D’Armenie.
“Technically speaking, we were not missionaries. We went
to Tarsus at the invitation of Dr. Thomas Davidson Christie, the
President of the College2 there, to spend a year rendering
what service we could to the regularly appointed missionaries; therefore
I am at liberty to express, as I did above, my admiration for the
American missionaries from a purely impartial standpoint.”3
states the author.
Shortly after her marriage to Herbert Adams Gibbons in June 1908
at the age of 25, she traveled with her husband to Turkey where
he was working on his doctoral thesis, teaching and also writing
as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald.4
[In 1916 Herbert published The Blackest Page of Modern History:
Events in Armenia in 1915 – The Facts and Responsibilities.]
Following the birth of her first child, Christine Este, she left
Tarsus for Egypt in May 1909, and eventually remained in France
during the war years, where she founded the organization known as
“Sauvons Les Bebes, which is credited with having saved 5000
war orphans. Later she became a lecturer representing the Young
Men’s Christian Association with the American Expeditionary
Forces. She was the correspondent of the Century Magazine at the
1919 Peace Conference.
Helen Davenport Gibbons also contributed articles to the Century
and Harper’s magazines and to the Pictorial Review. In addition
she authored A Little Grey Home in France in (1918), Paris
Vistas (1919) and Four Little Pilgrims (1926), which
were all published by the Century Company of New York. She was educated
at Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) and Simmons (Boston) colleges and traveled
extensively in the United States on behalf of American schools in
the Near East. She died in Princeton, New Jersey on September 1,
1960.
Other Sources: New York Times Obituary: Helen Davenport
Gibbons Dies; Author and Lecturer Was 77
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1 Red Rugs of Tarsus – page 106
2 The college was St. Paul’s Institute, a privately funded
college supported by Colonel Elliott Shepard of New York City. Shepard
died leaving the college without adequate funding, which obligated
the Christies to continually seek funds for the school. The Christies
worked 43 years as Congregational missionaries in Turkey, spending
16 years in Marash, Christie assumed the presidency of St. Paul’s
in Tarsus in 1893, resigning and returning to America in 1920. He
died in 1921. The Christies witnessed the massacres of 1895, 1909
and 1915. They provided refuge and relief to many Armenian people.
Source: Minnesota Historical Society, Manuscript Collections of
Thomas and Carmelite Christie and Family: An Inventory of Their
Papers
3 Red Rugs of Tarsus – Preface - page xiv
4 The “New York Herald” was a large distribution newspaper
based in New York City that existed between May 6, 1835 and 1924.Through
a series of mergers and acquisitions it has become the International
Herald Tribune, an influential English language paper, printed at
26 sites around the world and for sale in more than 180 countries.
Herald Square, the famous landmark on 34th Street at the crossing
of Broadway and Sixth Avenue in New York City, takes its name from
the New York Herald newspaper.
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