Most scholarship on mass violence at the end of the Ottoman Empire has been produced within either a Turkish or an Armenian nationalist framework. Due to these conceptual blinders, the historical scholarship on forced migration is dominated by two separate literatures: one focusing almost exclusively on the travails of the Muslim muhacirin (‘refugees’) and a completely separate body of historical work detailing the suffering of the Christian populations of Anatolia. Studies of the systematic removal of the Muslim inhabitants of Caucasus and the Balkans are mostly written in Turkish, base their findings on documents culled from Ottoman archival collections, and strenuously avoid any discussion of what happened between 1913 and 1923. Conversely, the immense scholarship on the Armenian Aghed (‘Catastrophe’) or Assyrian Shato d'Sayfo (‘year of the sword’), relies extensively on survivor narratives, foreign consular reports, and missionary accounts, and is focused almost entirely on the period between 1914 and 1918. At the end of the 19th century, it was commonly believed by many Ottoman Armenians, that Muslim refugees were purposefully settled in areas of the Ottoman Empire with large Christian (Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and Assyrian) populations in order to ‘engineer’ a more homogenous nation-state. It has been widely speculated by a number of historians – but never proven empirically – that these traumatized refugees played a critical role in the state-sanctioned violence against Christian communities between 1915 and 1923. For instance, membership of the infamous Teşkilat-i Mahsusa (‘Special Organization’), a vehicle for state-directed violence, was composed in large part of muhacirin from the North Caucasus. This paper will seek to bridge the gulf between these two bodies of historical literature by focusing on the settlement of the Muslim muhacirin (‘refugees’) and, in particular, the changing relationship of these newcomers with the local populations in Adana in the decades before the violence. An exercise in micro-history, this paper will synthesize documents from the Ottoman archives, the British and French consulates, missionary accounts (ABCFM), newspapers and memoirs.