Influenza in the Upper Valley, 1918

By the beginning of the twentieth century, advances in technology had begun changing many aspects of daily life throughout America. Electric lighting came to the bigger towns in the Upper Valley. More and more often, cars appeared on the roads, not only in the bigger towns by the river, but in the smaller hill towns as well. The medical field, however, was not advancing as fast as some of the other aspects of life, and this was painfully apparent during the Influenza Epidemic of 1918.

By October of 1918, World War I was drawing to a close and the boys in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, who had been waiting to be sent overseas could breathe a sigh of relief. It looked as if the war was ending and they would not have to face death on a battlefield. Little did they know they were about to face a more deadly foe than the Axis soldiers.

In late August, several sailors came down with a respiratory illness that started with a cough, headache and nausea, followed by a rash. They quickly began to struggle for breath, eventually suffocating to death, some within a matter of hours, others after a few days. By August 29^th, 58 men had come down with the disease, and were hospitalized at the Chelsea naval hospital. From the hospital, the flu spread from health workers and servicemen throughout Boston and then through Massachusetts.

Fort Devens, in Ayer, was especially hard hit. One doctor has been quoted as saying that they were losing 100 men a day, and special trains were used to carry away the dead. The army began a program of rapid discharge, sending soldiers home quickly. These young men arrived home in the throes of illness, spreading the sickness throughout New England.

The epidemic peaked on October 12 and by that time it had spread to New Hampshire and Vermont. That week, there were 393 deaths in New Hampshire, but the deaths continued until 1919. Influenza caused lingering illnesses like pneumonia and other lung diseases that people continued to die of long after the epidemic had ended, making deaths from the disease underreported. Many people who “survived” influenza remained chronically ill and died several years later of related illnesses. New Hampshire was the least hardest hit of any of the New England states, which is surprising when you think how close it is to Boston, where the sickness originated. Rural areas suffered less than cities did. In New Hampshire, Concord, Manchester and Portsmouth all took it hard, but the city hit the hardest was Berlin.

Vermont was hit harder than New Hampshire, possibly because we had so many soldiers who came home from Fort Devens. 13 percent of the population got the flu and 25 percent of the deaths in 1918 in Vermont were from influenza, which is even more significant when you think that the flu arrived in October. Barre and Montpelier were hardest hit, followed by Burlington. The closest town to the Upper Valley that suffered significant numbers of deaths from the flu was Randolph. Even so, every town experienced some deaths from the epidemic, and by October 4^th, state officials issued an order cancelling all public meetings. Schools, colleges, courthouses and churches were closed, and people were encouraged to shop only for necessary items, and if it was necessary to enter a public place, to wear a medical face mask.

Larry Coffin, in his blog “In Times Past” ( http://larrycoffin.blogspot.com/2009/03/influenza-and-other-epidemics.html ) quotes the Journal Opinion on October 4^th, 1918, saying that many local businesses in Bradford, including the bank, were closed due to lack of available personnell. The next week, the paper reported on the order from Montpelier cancelling all public meetings, and also that “ The Opinion force is decimated by sickness and otherwise, and the local happenings being confined almost entirely to sickness and death notices, unprecedented in our long years of experience in publishing this paper, is our excuse for lack of local items this week.” One of the “otherwise” situations was the death of the newspaper editor's son, a sailor who had died at a Navy station in Virginia. The young man's funeral was a private ceremony, as were all funerals during the ban on public gatherings.