Influenza in Hartford, Vermont

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 13^th. 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.