Jessie Carryl Smith

3 July

Jessie Carryl Smith, deaconess at Holy Trinity Church in Paris, France, and later in Alaska, New York, and Philadelphia, died 3 July 1923.

Jessie Carryl Smith was an actress in New York. At the age of thirty, she entered the New York Training School for Deaconesses, graduating in 1902. She was set apart as a deaconess at Holy Trinity Church in Paris in 1906. While in Paris she ran a small hospital infirmary. During World War I Deaconess Smith served on the front lines in France at various field hospitals, including one that cared for wounded Senegalese soldiers serving with the Third Army of France. For her work on the front lines, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre with the Medaille de Reconnaissance by the government of France. In 1920 Smith traveled to Fort Yukon in Alaska to serve in the mission field, returning in 1921 to New York. She served the parish of St. Simeon in the Bronx and was also manager of the St. Paul’s Chapel Lunch Club in lower Manhattan. In 1922 she took a position at St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Philadelphia where she taught a course in church history at a private girls’ school. She died suddenly on 3 July 1923 at Kings Park, Long Island, New York. [research of Deacon Geri Swanson]