The Spanish Influenza was a worldwide
epidemic that travelled with the soldiers of World War I in 1918. It
killed 500 million people worldwide and at least 500,000 in the
United States. Families in the Upper Valley lost loved ones to the
Spanish Flu, but not on the huge scale experienced in other places.
Most sources state that influenza hit the state of Vermont harder
than the state of New Hampshire, but scientists and historians are at
a loss to explain why. Possibly more Vermonters were serving in Fort
Devens, and as they got sick and returned home so their families
could take care of them, and as they died and their bodies were
shipped home for burial, the returning soldiers brought the disease
with them.
In Lebanon, people were still dying
of influenza well into 1919. Some of the people who died in January
and February of 1919 died from pneumonia and meningitis they
contracted as a result of having had influenza earlier, including a
six year old little girl who died of sepsis from an ear infection she
developed after having been sick with influenza. It is unclear
whether or not these deaths that occurred as a result of
complications from the flu were included in official counts of deaths
from influenza.
In terms of actual numbers, the
record of vital statistics in Lebanon lists 94 people who died in
Lebanon in 1917, 96 in 1918, 106 in 1919 and 98 in 1920. Although
these numbers do not indicate a significant increase in deaths, there
were 27 deaths from influenza in 1918, which is confusing, since
Lebanon's death records do not show a significant increase in overall
deaths in 1918. Were there less deaths in Lebanon in 1918 from other
causes? Federal officials made it mandatory for town clerks to
document every death from influenza. Did the increased workload
cause them to neglect to record other deaths? Thinking back to when I
looked at the death records in the Lebanon town clerk's office, it
did seem that once I saw the first listed influenza death, influenza
deaths were listed one after the other, without a scattering of
deaths from other causes. Certainly in October of 1918, people were
dying of causes other than influenza. They certainly did in the
other months of that year.
In Hartford, death records show that
61 people died in 1916 and 60 in 1917. I was struck by how many
drownings there were. In 1918, 97 people died in Hartford and in
1919, 74. This was a much more significant uptick in deaths than in
either Lebanon or Plainfield. I can say, however, that there were
deaths from other causes listed with the influenza deaths. All told,
32 people from Hartford died of influenza, almost all of them in
October. While the town clerk in Hartford may have done a better job
as far as accuracy goes, many of the entries were close to illegible.
I also noticed that many more people died at Mary Hitchcock Hospital
than in Lebanon, many of them children, often within hours of being
admitted. In my mind, I pictured frantic parents hitching the horse
to the wagon, wrapping their child into a blanket, getting into the
wagon and traveling from White River to Hanover, taking the last
ditch effort of taking their mortally ill child to the hospital.
Wicked sad.
Speaking of wicked sad, it was in the
Hartford Death Records that I found an instance of a soldier sent
home in a casket from Fort Devens after dying from Spanish Influenza.
Hartford's first death from the flu was Avon Lincoln, age 26, who
died at Fort Devens on September 27, 1918. Hartford was also the
first town I researched that had two deaths in the same family.
Sadly, very sadly, it was also the Lincoln family, who lost their
older son, Harold, on October 13th. Avon and Harold's
parents were Charles and Viola Lincoln, and they lived in Wilder.
They lived in the house right next to the
church that is now the
Wilder Events Center. The house was built in 1900 and the Charles,
Viola and the boys were the first family that ever lived there.
Charles was a steamfitter at the paper
mill in Wilder, and Viola was a dressmaker. Avon was 20 when he died.
Before he entered the army, he had been a salesman and shipping clerk
for Smith and Son. George Smith owned two businesses in town, the
Vermont Baking Company and White River Paper. William could have
worked for either. The Vermont Baking Company made crackers, and was
bought by the Tip Top Bread Company in the 1940's, and still exists
on South Main Street as an office building/art gallery. White River
Paper still exists in Hatford Village. If I had to guess, I would say
that Avon worked for the baking company, because it was closer to
Wilder.
Harold was older. He was 27 when he
died, married, and a father to three little girls. I can only imagine
how much of a comfort it was to Charles and Viola that they had three
granddaughters. Viola, as a dressmaker, must have enjoyed making
dresses for her granddaughters. Harold's wife's name was Margaret,
and she was born in Wales. The girls' names were Marguerite, Eileen
Esme, who was called by her middle name, and Evelyn. Evelyn was only
a few months old when her father died.
Charles and Viola sold the house two
years after their sons died. Viola died two years later, in 1922.
Charles lived until 1936.
When I researched Margaret and the
girls on Ancestry.com, I expected that they would have moved in with
Charles and Viola, but Margaret maintained her own household on
Gillette Street in Wilder. In 1920, she lived on Gillette St with the
girls, a boarder and his son. In 1930, she lived in Windsor with the
girls and a different boarder. After that, she and the girls
disappear from the census rolls.
Family trees on Ancestry.com show that
Eveyn and Eileen Esme both married and had children. Evelyn
eventually moved to Florida and was still living in 1993. She had at
least one child. Eileen Esme married a man named Paul Varney. Their
wedding was in Hanover. She stayed in the Upper Valley. She lived in
Wilder in the 1050's and died in 1974 at age 57. I cannot find
Marguerite anywhere, as an adult.
I have been thinking about Avon
Lincoln, World War I and the draft. In the early 1900's the United
States had a small peacetime army, with the Federal Army numbering
around 100,000 and the National Guard at 115,000. When war was
declared on Germany in April of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked
for the army to be increased to number at least a million. Wilson and
his advisors hoped that enough men would volunteer, but that didn't
happen, so Congress resorted to a draft. By the end of the war, 2
million men ended up volunteering and 2.8 million were drafted. There
is no way of proving that Avon Lincoln was drafted, but I don 't
believe that he volunteered. He was in his mid twenties and had an
established job. He wasn't living in a hill town, eking out a living
on his father's farm and desperate for a way out.
Although World War I gets much less
press than World War II, and the United States was in the first World
War for a much shorter time, American losses were considerable in
that conflict. Excluding the Civil War, America lost the most
soldiers in World War II than in any other war America has been
involved in. After World War II, World War I was the next most
deadliest war, followed by the Vietnam War. 116,516 soldiers died in
World War I, with another 321,000 casualties. In addition to deaths
in Europe, 43,000 servicemen died of influenza while they were
stateside in military camps, training to join the war overseas.
