The Influenza Epidemic of 1918

in Boone-Duden Country
by Bob Brail

            Epidemic is terrifying word.  Even in our modern world with all its medical knowledge, the word epidemic reminds us of how uncertain life is and how quickly death may come.  When we hear it, we quickly think of diseases like the bubonic plague, or Black Death, of the Middle Ages, or today’s best known epidemic, AIDS.

           

            In the fall of 1918 the most deadly epidemic this world has ever known began rampaging from continent to continent, leaving at least fifty million of the world’s 1.8 billion people dead in its wake, the majority of them dying in a six month period.  In contrast, the AIDS epidemic has been responsible for somewhat more than half that number of deaths in a thirty year period although the world’s population has more than tripled since 1918.

           

            This epidemic was the 1918 influenza outbreak.  Although its most deadly work was done in and near the larger cities of the world, even rural communities such as those found in the Boone-Duden area would eventually be touched by its horror.

           

            The 1918 influenza epidemic probably had its beginning in Kansas, but certainly was spread through American troop movements of World War I.  The first accounts of the deaths came from military encampments throughout the United States, from which thousands of infected soldiers were shipped to the front in Europe, thereby ensuring the eventual spread of the disease to the rest of the world.  The illness had especially gruesome symptoms: “Flu victims, often young people, fell ill and died within days (sometimes hours) as they drowned on a frothy, bloody fluid that filled their lungs.  The stricken suffered a general weakness usually comprised of sore muscles and aches in their heads and backs combined with fevers up to 105 degrees.  They also endured respiratory distress, each breath a struggle, with their faces and limbs eventually turning gray then blue/purple from lack of oxygen.”

           

            Midwesterners, including residents of Boone-Duden country, must have experienced a great sense of dread as they learned about the wave of death that was headed their direction.  Perhaps the hardest hit city in America was Philadelphia.  In early October Harry Remer, a resident of St. Charles, wrote his mother from Philadelphia that 30,000 people were ill from influenza.  All schools, churches, and other public places had been closed, and hundreds of shipyard workers were ill with the deadly flu.  One historian describes the outbreak in Philadelphia as an explosion.  In a little more than one week in early October, the epidemic grew in Philadelphia from a couple of deaths a day and a few hundred ill to hundreds of deaths daily and hundreds of thousands ill.  Bodies accumulated because gravediggers and undertakers were also being sickened and killed by the disease.  A shortage of coffins soon resulted; “bodies stacked up . . . stacked up out to the buried. . . . They couldn’t bury them.”  Doctors and nurses died as they heroically tried to stop the onslaught.

           

            The epidemic reached St. Louis in the first days of October.  By October 8, 164 St. Louisans had been infected and nine had died in the previous twenty-four hours.  On that day, all movie theaters, playhouses, churches, and lodges in St. Louis were closed; they did not reopen until mid-November.  All commercial businesses were closed on November 9 and remained so for four days; the Post-Dispatch called it a “virtual suspension of . . . commercial life.”  The number of deaths in St. Louis more than tripled in the last three months of 1918.

           

            Influenza roared into the town of St. Charles about the same time it began to infest St. Louis.  The St. Charles Cosmos-Monitor reported the city’s first influenza death on October 9, Leon Blankenkship, a station agent for the CB & Q Railroad.  On October 10, St. Charles closed all schools, churches, and other public gathering places.  By October 16, 200 citizens were infected.  The City Board of Health ordered a quarantine of all influenza cases.  Public funerals and open caskets were banned.  As the newspaper stated, “Wise people will keep away from crowds.”

           

            On October 19, the St. Charles County Board of Health decided not to issue quarantine orders for the county.  The county physician described precautions against influenza in the rural areas as “useless.”  By the middle of October, Wentzville closed its schools.  The village of Augusta temporarily closed its businesses.  The epidemic worked quickly, and by early November health officials reported fewer new cases, although those already infected continued to die.  By November 20, Cosmos-Monitor’s Hamburg correspondent reported, “All parties having influenza are up and about again in this town,” and on December 11, its O’Fallon correspondent wrote, “The flu has about run its course here.”  Deaths from influenza, however, continued until March.

           

            A study of death certificates issued in St. Charles and Warren Counties during the influenza epidemic of 1918 and for one year earlier than the epidemic illustrates just how deadly this disease was to Boone-Duden country.  Although sixty-eight deaths pales in comparison to the tens of millions who died elsewhere because of influenza, one begins to understand the horror these people experienced upon learning that almost no one had died of the disease one year earlier:

Boone-Duden Area Deaths from Influenza Epidemic

                                                                                          

                                                           Oct. 1918-Mar. 1919     Oct. 1917-Mar. 1918

St. Charles County Townships

            Portage Des Sioux                                  3                                     0

            St. Charles                                            27                                     1

            Cuivre                                                    12                                     0

            Dardenne                                              14                                     1

            Callaway                                                 5                                      0

            Femme Osage                                       6                                      0

Warren County Townships

            Charrette                                                1                                       0

Total  Area Influenza Deaths                             68                                      2                

            Even Boone-Duden county in rural St. Charles County, with its relatively small population, had too many tragedies resulting from influenza.  On October 31, Ben and Anna Griesenaur of Dardenne Township, both thirty-four years old, died of influenza, leaving four children ranging in age from seven to three months.  On November 14, George Peters lost his wife Agnes.  Mrs. George Price, age thirty-four, who lived near Enterprise School with her husband and four children, was killed by influenza.  The day after Christmas twenty-one year old Willie Sutton was buried in the Thomas Howell Cemetery.  In Callaway Township, fourteen year old Stella Betchel succumbed to the disease on November 2.  Three weeks later her ten year old sister, Lucy, also died.  Fred and Lizzie Muencher, also of Callaway Township, lost their premature baby on November 7 because Lizzie was ill with influenza; twelve days later the disease also took Lizzie.  Three days before Christmas, twenty-six year old Rena Zollmann, married just ten months and the mother of a baby, died in New Melle. 

           

            Some of the Boone-Duden area’s latest influenza deaths occurred in Femme Osage Township in Augusta.  There in February Hubert Meyer, a thirty-six year old foreman at the Klondike sand pit, died, and on March 12, Herman Kessler, a thirty-year old barber and bartender, died.  August and Rosina Theilemann lost their eight year old daugher Thekla, in February.  Three African American residents of Augusta also died during the epidemic: Headley Mozee, Robert Mosely, and Madory Teeter.

           

            As much as one-third of the world’s population was infected by influenza during the outbreak that began in 1918.  Although rural St. Charles County was fairly isolated then, it too was ravaged by this deadly disease.  Even the tiny villages and farms of Boone-Duden country could not hide from this tragedy.

                       

Sources: Augusta’s Harmony (Anita Mallinckrodt); Boats, Trains, and Immunity (journals.hil.unb.ca\index.php); Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (www.stlouisfed.org); The Great Influenza (John M. Barry); Missouri Death Certificates (www.sos.mo.gov/archives); The St. Charles Cosmos Monitor (microfilm); The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (ProQuest Historical Newspapers).