Yellow Fever and the Price of the Port

Every port city of the Gulf Coast paid a recurring tax in the nineteenth century, measured not in money but in lives. Mobile paid it every summer for a hundred years.

Yellow fever arrived with the shipping lanes. The earliest outbreak recorded here came in seventeen hundred and four, killing forty of the two hundred and twenty-five colonists at Fort Louis. As Mobile grew into a serious cotton port in the nineteenth century, the disease intensified, spreading from the ships and their mosquito populations into the waterfront neighborhoods and then across the city.

In the epidemic year of eighteen nineteen, the year Alabama entered the Union, Mobile lost several hundred people out of a population of about a thousand, roughly a third of the town. The city established the Church Street Graveyard that same year to bury its dead under one of the oldest organized cemetery plans in the state.

Eighteen thirty-nine brought another four hundred and fifty deaths. The worst year was eighteen fifty-three, when eleven hundred and ninety-one people died in a single summer, about seven percent of the summer population. The novelist Augusta Evans Wilson, who grew up in Mobile, used the epidemic as a backdrop in her novel Beulah, published in eighteen fifty-nine.

Physicians of the era did not understand that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes transmitted the virus. They blamed miasma, bad air rising from the waterfront mud. The cure they reached for, draining swamps and burning tar, sometimes helped by accident, for reasons they could not explain.