In mid-November 1873, 150 years ago, there was a hard freeze in the upstate city of Shreveport. That sudden break in the weather may have been long forgotten except that it saved many lives in a town that had been overwhelmed by deaths.
Awareness of the troubles ahead began that previous August 23 when the bodies of three men who had been turned away from an infirmary were found downtown on Texas Street. Sixteen- year- old James Lewis was identified as one of the victims; the other two were unknown.
At the time of the outbreak, Shreveport was a young but prosperous town. Located on the Red River there was an active steamboat port and the town’s commerce had the advantage of proximity to Texas. Once the outbreak began, however, business, prosperity, joy and hope all slammed into a wall. Like its people, Shreveport was dying.
Ten days after the first deaths, “The Daily Shreveport Times” announced that the illness was yellow fever. It was a transmitted illness, but at the time of the Shreveport deaths no one knew what did the transmitting. According to Chery White, a history professor at LSU-Shreveport who has actively studied the epidemic, it wasn’t until the 1900s, when deaths from the digging of the Panama Canal prompted more research, that airborne mosquitoes were discovered to be the culprits.
White says that the illness is believed to have reached Louisiana through the port of New Orleans where a crewman on a ship from South America had died. From there the infection spread to a nearby steam ship whose travels included the Red River and then to Shreveport. What followed would be recognized as the third largest yellow fever epidemic in the nation’s history.
Over the next three months there would be approximately 1,200 deaths, roughly one-fourth of the city’s population. It would be said that the most common sound in the once thriving city was that of hearses and carriages used to collect the dead.
There were so many victims that the city opened a mass grave at its Oakland Cemetery. Approximately 800 bodies are believed to have been delivered there—not in coffins or body bags but sent to eternity dressed as they were.
Then came what seemed to be a miracle: Beginning with an early frost in October followed by the hard freeze in November, the changes in the weather were fatal to the carrier mosquitoes who were “forced into dormancy.” The epidemic was over.
Besides incalculable grief, there would be many side stories to the tragedy. One is about five French Catholic priests serving in various Louisiana dioceses who volunteered to go to Shreveport to minister to the sick. All five knew that they might become victims themselves. (One of the priests supposedly responded that an early death would just shorten his distance to heaven.) All five died.
Today there is a movement to have the Vatican canonize (recognize as being saints) the priests. It is a long demanding process, but just maybe one day Shreveport can celebrate its Saints.
(In New Orleans there is a similar effort for the canonization of Father Francis Seelos, a German-born, Redemptorist priest who died in 1867 from administering to the city’s Yellow Fever victims. Surely the five French priests would have heard about Seelos and his encounter with the disease.)
And then there is the saga of the 800 victims in the mass grave. White and an LSU- Shreveport history colleague, Gary Joiner, have worked to identify the victims. Newspaper records from the time, and academic research techniques, have helped to identify most of them. For this sesquicentennial year of the epidemic, public funds and private donations were collected to construct a memorial at the Oakland Cemetery burial site. It consists of eight pillars with approximately 100 names inscribed on each.
Also, a permanent yellow fever exhibit has been established at the Spring Street Museum. The site, a former bank, and the oldest building in Shreveport, stands near the spot where the first three victims were spotted in August 1873.
Both the city and its downtown development district planned to host a celebratory Victorian dinner in November to commemorate the end of the epidemic. Appropriately, the event is referred to as “The Merciful Frost.”
