On This Day in the Old West: July 12

Fever! Before the germ theory became popular in the late 1800s, people had no idea what caused the various deadly fevers that swept through towns and cities, sometimes taking thousands of lives. On July 12, 1878, a bad bout of yellow fever began in New Orleans. It would eventually lead to the deaths of some 4,000 citizens—and would spur an effort that saw a new way of managing water and waste which would do away with much of the contagion that bred such disease.

Streets before the 20^th Century were filthy places to walk. The pedestrians of a city would be confronted with offensive sights and smells, and often forced to walk through it as well. The streets of New Orleans were no exception: after the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the largest, smelliest, and deadliest cities in America. Its streets, 80% of which were still unpaved in 1880, were littered with refuse, including garbage, food waste, and both human and animal excrement. Dirty, stagnant water lay everywhere. And although the Department of Public Works was responsible for maintaining drainage, the lack of elevation in the city meant that the water had nowhere to go. Workers “cleaned” the gutters and canals by shoveling the muck into the streets—where it just washed back with the first rain.

Most big cities of this time had developed sewage systems, but New Orleans still relied on privies and gutters (even the rare indoor plumbing had to connect to a privy or gutter for disposal). Well water in the city was polluted and the city water from the New Orleans Waterworks Co. came straight from the Mississippi River. Drinking water came from cisterns. Any of these sources of water could transmit diseases such as cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and yellow fever. Mosquitoes, later discovered to be the actual vectors of disease transmission, found New Orleans the perfect breeding ground.

New Orleans was “a city of epidemics,” especially of yellow fever, which returned practically every year after 1825. Fever epidemics were thought to be caused by “miasma,” humid air acting on filthy, undrained soil. This led to “solutions” such as burning tar or other strong-smelling substances and shooting cannons into the air to “purify” it. Many also felt that disease was brought into the city by immigrants aboard the many ships in port, which led to strong anti-immigrant sentiment and a belief that locals were immune to the disease.

After the Civil War, the nation as a whole made great strides in sanitation but change came slowly in New Orleans. Climate and topography made improvements expensive and the public seemingly had no concern for public sanitation. One report said that “insalubrity was flatly denied, or disbelieved.” It wasn’t until the epidemic of 1978, which swept up the Mississippi River Valley as far as Memphis, that New Orleans was shocked out of its lethargy.

Upriver towns and neighboring Gulf Coast cities like Mobile barred all travel to and from New Orleans at the first hint of disease. The economic impact of quarantine finally moved the businesses of the city to take action. The Board of Health and The Howard Association, both formed to deal with earlier bouts of yellow fever, had for years been trying to educate citizens about their home city’s shameful sanitation conditions. Now, these organizations were joined by businessmen and social leaders, and changes were finally put into effect. Some large businesses (like D.H. Holmes and the Charles Hotel) built their own sewer lines to the river. Other prominent citizens created their own organizations to study the problem and recommend a solution. These didn’t last long, but one that did, the Auxiliary Sanitary Association, improved drainage canals, donated garbage barges to the city, and repaired city-owned equipment. One of its most successful efforts was a system of gutter flushing that cleaned up many New Orleans streets.

Throughout the 1880s, there were few deaths from yellow fever and people stopped voting for sanitation measures to be improved. It wasn’t until the fever struck again in 1897 that people were frightened enough to approve funds for a drainage and sewage system which would permanently clean up the city. When yellow fever broke out again in 1905, the city was armed with the new knowledge of mosquito vectors and ordered citizens to get rid of standing water and cover their cisterns. A quarantine kept people in their homes until the fever ran its course. This marked the last break-out of yellow fever on the North American continent. “America’s most plague-ridden city” had finally cleaned up its act.

 

J.E.S. Hays
www.jeshays.com
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A version of the article I used as reference was originally written by John Magill in The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly. It was later enhanced with new research by Emily Perkins, curatorial cataloguer. The Historic New Orleans Collection, May 12, 2020.