In his recent annual appeal letter, Director Jack Davis referenced a delightful letter written by Natalie Murray Gifford to her family on Thanksgiving Day, 1922, that the School has on file in the Archives. You can read it below in its entirety.
Natalie Murray Gifford (Mrs. William Frank Wyatt) was a Fellow of the American School during the academic year 1922–1923. Transcriptions of her letters were presented to the American School in 1974 by her son, the late William (Bill) F. Wyatt, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Brown University and Harvard Fellow at the American School in 1959–1960. According to the introductory letter that Bill Wyatt wrote to accompany his mother’s letters:
The value of the letters resides in the immediacy and detail with which every day events and characters at the American School are described. There is no theorizing about how the School was or should be run, and very little reference to the exciting and horrible political events in Greece at the time. Rather they constitute a nearly complete social history of the American School in 1922–1923.
Read Natalie Murray Gifford’s letter home.
Front, left to right: Philip H. Davis and Carl W. Blegen; Back, left to right: Dorothy H. Cox and Natalie M. Gifford.
Date: March 23, 1923