Selected Backlist
Across America on an Emigrant Train
Blizzard
The Great Fire
Inside the Alamo
The Journal of James Edmond Pease: A Civil War Union
Soldier: Virginia, 1863
My Face to the Wind: The Diary of Sarah Jane
Price, a Prairie School Teacher, Broken Bow, Nebraska,
1881 (Dear America Series)
West to a Land of Plenty: The Diary of Teresa
Angelino Viscardi (Dear America Series)
A Young Patriot: The American Revolution as Experienced
by One Boy
Excerpt from An American
Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow
Fever Epidemic of 1793
In all respects it seemed as if August 3 1793, was
a very normal day in Philadelphia, with business and
buying and pleasure as usual.
Oh, there were a few who felt a tingle of unease. For
weeks an unusually large supply of wild pigeons had
been for sale at the market. Popular folklore suggested
that such an abundance of pigeons always brought with
it unhealthy air and sickness.
Dr. Benjamin Rush had no time for such silly notions,
but he, too, sensed that something odd was happening.
His concern focused on a series of illnesses that had
struck his patients throughout the year – the
mumps in January, jaw and mouth infections in February,
scarlet fever in March, followed by influenza in July.
“There was something in the heat and drought,”
the good Doctor speculated, “which was uncommon
in their influence upon the human body.”
The Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth of the Lutheran congregation,
too, thought something was wrong in the city, though
it had nothing to do with sickness of the body. It was
the souls of its citizens he worried about. “
Philadelphia . . .seemed to strive to exceed all other
places in the breaking of the Sabbath,” he noted.
A increasing number of people shunned church and went
instead to the taverns, where they drank and gambled:
too many others spent their free time in theatres which
displayed “rope-dancing and other shows.”
Sooner or later, he warned the city would feel God’s
displeasure.
Rush and Helmuth would have been surprised to know
that their worries were turning to reality on August
3. For on that Saturday a young French sailor rooming
at Richard Denny’s boarding house, over on North
Water Street, was desperately ill with a fever. Eighteenth
century record keeping wasn’t very precise, so
no one bothered to write down his name. Besides, the
sailor was poor and a foreigner, not the sort of person
who would draw much attention from the community around
him. all we know is that his fever worsened and was
accompanied by violent seizures, and that a few days
later he died.
Other residents at Denny’s would follow this sailor
to the grave – a Mr. Moore fell into a stupor
and passed away, Mrs. Richard Parkinson expired on August
7, next the lodging house owner and his wife, Mary,
and the first sailor’s roommate. Around the same
time, two people in the house next to Denny’s
died of the same severe fever.
Eight deaths in the pace of a week in two houses on
the same street. . .but the city did not take notice.
Summer fevers were common visitors to all American cities
in the eighteenth century, and therefore not headline
news. Besides, Denny’s was located on a narrow
out-of-the-way street – really more of an alley
than a street. “Its is much confined” a
resident remarked, “ill-aired, and in every respect,
is a disagreeable street.” things happened along
this street all the time – sometimes very bad
things – they went unnoticed by the authorities
and the ret of the population.
So the death did not disrupt Philadelphia much at
all. Ships came and went: men and women did chore, talked,
and sought relief from the heat and the insects; the
markets and the shops hummed with activity; children
played; and the city, state and federal governments
went about their business.
No one noticed that the church bells were tolling
more often than usual to announce one death, and then
another. They rang for Dr. Hugh Hodge’s little
daughter, for Peter Aston, for John Weyman, for Mary
Shewell, and for a boy named McNair. No one knew that
a killer was already moving through their streets with
them, an invisible stalker that would go house to house
until it had touched everyone, rich or poor, in some
terrible way.
