configure: error: unable to locate liblwgrp installation

[sailnfool]

/usr/local/lib $ ls liblwgrp.a libyogrt libyogrt.so.1 pkgconfig python3.5 liblwgrp.la libyogrt.la libyogrt.so.1.0.0 pypy2.7 liblwgrp.so libyogrt.so pdsh python2.7
./configure --with-lwgrp="/usr/local/lib/"
Checking whether /usr/bin/mpicc responds to '-showme:compile'... yes checking for liblwgrp installation... configure: error: unable to locate liblwgrp installation

This was run on a raspbian stretch release: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ dated April 2019
Other packages related to SCR compiled and built without problem. This is a Raspberry PI 3B with an armv71 CPU with 4 64-bit cores.

Note that this appears to build correctly in the context of scr/buildmedeps but not from a git clone, so I suspect a minor configuration/context issue.