Memphis yellow fever

All those public events came to a halt when the yellow fever epidemics swept over our city in deadly waves in the s. The Odd Fellows — along with other groups, such as the Howard Association, the Masons, and the brave nuns and priests of St. We need your sympathy and God alone knows how soon your aid. The number of brothers who have died is 95, and of their families , making the number of deaths This indeed tells the sad story of our calamities.

Some time after the first of these epidemics, in , Elmwood Cemetery set aside a spacious plot for Odd Fellows Rest, with several hundred members, to date, buried there, many of them victims of yellow fever.

That entire section was renovated years ago, all the older markers replaced with simpler ones, each of them practically identical — just a square stone with a metal nameplate mounted to the top. But some of these graves are much older than you might think. I came across a simple marker for Maggie Blew shown here and because the stone looked so new, assumed it was a fairly recent burial.

Death records show, however, that this is the grave of an year-old girl, who died in the yellow fever epidemic of All of them were found dead in their home at Wellington and Vance on September 16, Mantle was born in Spavinaw, Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Cary Stayner, the serial killer convicted in the grisly murders of four women near Yosemite National Park, is born on August 13, Responding to increasing Soviet pressure on western Berlin, U.

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This Day In History. History Vault. Today, yellow-fever outbreaks still occur in Africa and South America. Latin America. Art, Literature, and Film History. Ancient Americas. This Day in History. Sign Up. The only remedy was to bury the victims in mass, anonymous plots.

He had flowers to strew on the grave, but he searched in vain. The grave was lost. The hard work soon took its toll. On September 2nd, Parsons became ill with the fever and was put to bed.

Parsons had a chill this evening. I shall know before twelve whether it was THE chill. The sisters watched over Parsons fretfully, but he died on September 7th. Two days later, one of the other nuns found Constance resting on a sofa in the parlor of St.

Give me a cup of tea, and I shall go to bed. Constance became delirious. That was her last word. All that she had she gave without reserve to her Lord. Sister Thecla remained conscious until the end. I was thinking of heavenly things. Sister Ruth was the next victim. Just 26 years old, she had been a nun only a year. Sister Frances had been in charge of the orphanage home — a task that grew more difficult when the other sisters became ill.

She caught the fever in August, and recovered, but suffered a relapse on October 1st; she died just three days later. Yellow fever had infected more than , people, causing some 20, deaths — more than 5, in Memphis alone. Our city, one of the hardest hit, was so devastated that it lost its charter. There was one final martyr of St. Father Louis Schuyler reported for duty in Memphis after Parsons died.

Instead of staying at a hotel outside the fever district, Schuyler insisted on remaining at St. After only four days of constant labor, Schuyler fell ill with fever, and died on September 17th. When it was over, towns and cities across the South lay wasted.

Another wave of yellow fever swept through the next year, with smaller epidemics every year after that, but nothing compared to the devastation of Walter Reed, an American army surgeon working in Cuba, finally discovered that mosquitos were the source of the plague. Out of the death and chaos, the noble work performed by the priests and nuns of St. This generous giving ought to silence, for a time at least, the snarls of the misanthropists.

It is strange that so much dying should prove to us that the world is worth living in. Today, the massive altar in St. A brass wall plaque and stained-glass window are further tributes to the sisters and to Parsons and Schuyler. The feast day is observed on September 9th each year. In Elmwood Cemetery, a simple shaft marks the double graves of both Parsons and Schuyler.

Nearby, four names and dates are carved around the perimeter of a flat stone tablet: Constance, Sept.