Some years ago, while studying how Hammondsport experienced the First World War, I read through all the 1917-1918 issues of the Hammondsport Herald. I was puzzled to see that while there was much discussion of the so-called Spanish influenza, the Hammondsport region appeared to have been spared any deaths.
While this was possible, it also seemed to be awfully unlikely. By some calculations, this global pandemic killed one human being out of every twenty on earth. It was one of the greatest natural disasters ever, killing as many (or more) in four months than the Great War did in four years. It was a catastrophe on a par with the “Black Death,” or Native America’s population crash under European diseases. The Curtiss plant with its hundreds of overcrowded employees, and officials visiting from around the world, meant that the flu surely hit Hammondsport hard.
I later learned that information about the flu was often kept quiet — either because the whole thing was feared to be German biological warfare, or at least to prevent the enemy from learning how debilitated our forces might be.
Of course the Germans were suffering just as badly, and behaving with equal suspicion. This helps explain why the flu unfairly became Spanish. Spain was the only large neutral country in Europe, and so the only one without censorship — lots of flu news came from Spain, while everyone else was playing it close to the vest.
Also making it hard to sort out information is the fact that death certificates often specified pneumonia as the cause, which was functionally accurate, but ignores the fact that the pneumonia had been caused by the flu. The whole secrecy thing may also have encouraged pneumonia diagnoses.
Having had no luck in 1997 with the Hammondsport Herald, in 2014 I struck it rich with the Steuben Advocate, one of two weekly papers in Bath at the time and since merged with the Courier. Like today’s paper, the Advocate covered a wide circulation area, including Hammondsport.
There were two major spikes of the disease, one in early 1918 and another, even deadlier, in August through November. I looked particularly at the period which seemed worst locally — the issues of October 16, October 23, and October 30.
Screening out deaths from military causes, and deaths that were obviously not flu-related, I totted up the deaths reported in these three issues of the weekly paper, and I found deaths ascribed to:
Pneumonia 25
Influenza 14
Unstated 42
Or 81 deaths, not counting those excluded above. (In some cases these were local folks who had died elsewhere.)
By comparison, in 2014 the last three October issues of the Courier listed 11 deaths.
During this period of 1918 schools closed in Bath, Avoca, Corning, Hammondsport, Savona, and parts of Wheeler. Churches canceled services in Avoca, Corning, Prattsburgh, Corning, and South Bradford.
In Mount Morris, horse-drawn scrapers were digging graves for multiple burials. Dansville and Bath were reported as being hit hard.
Public places were closed in the Corning area, where about 3500 became ill and at least 72 died. Emergency hospitals were set up at Corning Glass Works and in Painted Post… the latter unit supervised by Ingersoll-Rand.
Hammondsport school children were ordered to stay on their own premises under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on doorstep. Churches and lodges were asked to close — BUT a suggestion to close saloons and pool rooms “met no response.” One newspaper grumpily observed that the government’s call to conserve coal conflicted with the government’s advice to keep warm and avoid the flu.
Although cases would continue for months, the worst outbreak tailed off so quickly it was almost bewildering… perhaps due as much to mutation in the virus as it was to the quarantine. By November 6, the Hammondsport flu quarantine was lifted (November 8 in Bath), just in time for jubilant crowds to celebrate the Armistice, on the eleventh day of that eleventh month.