Background
Thurber was born on May 19, 1880 in Norwich, Connecticut. He was the son of Charles Francis and Annie Elizabeth (Cragg) Thurber.
Thurber was born on May 19, 1880 in Norwich, Connecticut. He was the son of Charles Francis and Annie Elizabeth (Cragg) Thurber.
After attending the Norwich Free Academy, he entered Trinity College, Hartford, in 1899, but left after one year to do settlement house social work in Danbury, N. H.
He went to Canada to work for seven years introducing improved methods of caring for the mental and physical welfare of lumbermen in the woods. From 1910 to 1912 he was employed by the Young Men's Christian Association to do similar work among the soft-coal miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In 1912 he became superintendent of the Home for Homeless Boys at Covington, Va.
When the United States entered the World War in 1917, he left this position for work in the army camps with the Red Cross, which eventually made him director of its hospital work in the South, with headquarters at Greenville, S. C. When the war ended, he became social director of the United States Public Health Service at the same place. In 1921 he joined the Near East Relief organization and was appointed head of an orphanage of three thousand boys at Sivas in Eastern Turkey. After the defeat in 1922 of the Greek army in Anatolia by the Turkish forces under Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Thurber took in four thousand additional boys who had become orphans during the deportation and exchange of the Anatolian Greeks. For eight months he contrived to provide food and shelter for his boys, despite the meagerness of his funds and the suspicions of the local government. On one occasion he was arrested by Turkish authorities and so severely bastinadoed that thereafter he always walked with a limp. Eventually he led five thousand of the orphans on foot across the Pontic Mountains to the Black Sea coast. Thence they were taken on American battleships to Constantinople and housed in the Selimiye Barracks, made famous by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War.
While working there among eleven thousand typhus-stricken refugees, Thurber himself contracted the disease, but survived to become director of the Constantinople unit of the Near East Relief. Invalided home in 1924, he underwent three surgical operations and spent nearly a year in hospitals, but was nevertheless able during two years to address more than eleven hundred meetings on behalf of the relief organization, which in 1926 sent him back to Athens as director of its work in Greece.
In addition to regular duties connected with administering the orphanages and training the orphans in trades and farming, he undertook the establishment of three working-boys' homes for orphans who had left the institutions and were earning their own living.
The government of Greece, buried him with all the honors of a general after a state funeral service in the Cathedral of Athens.
Christopher Thurber saved 7, 000 Greek Children from Smyrna Catastrophe. His single-hearted devotion to his ideal of service, especially during a severe epidemic of dengue fever, his unstinted labors on behalf of Greek refugees, and his engaging personal qualities gained the respect and affection of the Greek people to a remarkable degree. The government of Greece bestowed upon him three decorations, including the Cross of War and the Golden Cross of the Order of the Saviour. His contribution to public education and health was so pervasive that the Greek government held a state funeral and declared a national day of mourning in his honor. No other American had, or has since, received such a tribute.
