Knapp, Grace H.

Grace Higley Knapp was born on November 21, 1870 in Bitlis, Turkey, to the Reverend George Cushing Knapp, a missionary, and Alzina Churchill Knapp, a schoolteacher. She left Turkey in April 1883 and attended schools in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Illinois. She entered Mount Holyoke Seminary and College in 1889. Graduating in 1893, she returned to Turkey to teach at Mount Holyoke Seminary of Kurdistan (also known as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Bitlis), a girls' school founded in 1868 by Mount Holyoke alumnae Charlotte E. and Mary A. C. Ely. Knapp taught at Bitlis (1893-1895, 1898-1902, 1910-1913), the American School in Erzerum (1896-1898), and the American School in Van (1913-1915). She worked with refugees in Van during and after the Armenian massacres in 1915. When foreigners were forced out she returned to the United States in October 1915. Between 1915-1918 she wrote and published books and pamphlets about her experiences, among them "The Mission at Van" (1915, rev. 1916) and "War Time at Van" (1916). She worked as a staff writer for the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief in New York City from 1918-1923 and on the editorial staff of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston, Massachusetts from 1923-1940. Her other published works include "The Tragedy of Bitlis" (1917), "An American Physician in Turkey" (1919, coauthored with Dr. Clarence Douglas Ussher), and a booklet of poems. She died at age eighty-two on March 14, 1953, in Auburndale, Massachusetts.

From the guide to the Knapp papers MS 0809., ca. 1893-1953., (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)