Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that the first two things built by any new community, no matter how optimistic, are a jail and a burying ground.
*That’s pretty much what happened in Bath. Charles Williamson started clearing ground to make a town in 1793, and that same year made the first burial – his 7 year-old daughter Christian – in what became the Pioneer Burying Ground.
*Christian died of “Genesee Fever” – probably malaria. And ever since, from time to time, waves of sickness have flowed over our region, hollowing out families and communities.
*One late-19th century family in North Cohocton had four children, and lost them all in one horrible January. In September they had another child, and she died within weeks. Who knows how they had the heart, but the couple later had five more children, all of whom lived to adulthood.)
*Cholera swept through from time to time, leaving high death tolls in its wake.
*But the worst epidemic was no doubt the Spanish influenza, which concentrated in 1918, the last year of the Great War. It seemed to spring from nowhere, and was suddenly scything down people in thousands. Men and women who woke up feeling fine had died in agony before sundown.
*It wasn’t Spanish, but with nearly every country at war, neutral Spain was the only large western European nation without censorship. News flowed freely from Spain, while other countries tried to keep the lid on, and Spain got harnessed (unfairly) to one of the worst pandemics in human history.
*This was a war of technological innovation, including various forms of gas warfare. When the new influenza’s death-dealing potency was recognized, many governments and militaries on both sides feared that this was biological warfare from their enemies. They restricted information.
*Even once medical personnel were pretty well satisfied that this was not germ warfare, neither side wanted the other to know how weak it had suddenly become. Regiments became unable to take up arms, and ships’ companies unable to sail. Information was still restricted.
*A century later, it’s still remembered only obscurely. The Spanish influenza rates with the Black Death of the Middle Ages, and the horrendous die-off of Native Americans exposed to new diseases from the Old World.
*Spanish Flu killed as many people in four months as the Great War killed in four years. But the war loomed so huge, and so traumatically, that it overshadowed the worst health crisis of the modern age.
*Perhaps too no one wanted to look back. Ninety percent of the War deaths were fighting men. But the flu snatched children from their mothers’ arms, or turned beloved parents into sparse dim memories. The fact that people prefered remembering World War One, rather than the Flu, tells us how horrendous the Flu really was.
*Right here where we are, Corning Glass Works operated a makeshift hospital for its workers. So did Ingersoll Rand, in Painted Post. In Mount Morris they used horse-drawn equipment to dig multiple graves.
*In Hammondsport children were ordered to stay on their own properties, under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on their doorsteps. Schools and churches closed in Avoca, Bradford, Wheeler, Hammondsport, Dansville, Bath.
*In a 27-week period Buffalo registered over 3000 deaths from influenza or pneumonia, and Rochester almost 1500. Put another way, Rochester’s 1918 death rate from those two causes was four times what it had been in either ’15 or ’16, and Buffalo’s was even higher. Statewide New York was more than triple.
*The worst of it burned out pretty quickly, perhaps because of the disease mutating – which was good news, since there was no preventive, and no treatment beyond palliating the symptoms until the caregivers fell ill themselves. Two good books on the subject are “American’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918” by Alfred W. Crosby and “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” by Laura Spinney.