Camp Grant: Influenza, Nineteen Eighteen

In the summer of nineteen seventeen, community leaders in Rockford lobbied the federal government hard for something they genuinely wanted: a military training camp on the flatlands south of the city. They succeeded. Camp Grant opened that year on fifty-six hundred acres, named for Ulysses S. Grant, and by the following summer it had become one of the largest infantry training installations in the country. The railroads brought draftees from across the Midwest. The camp filled with young men learning to be soldiers.

In late September of nineteen eighteen, a microscopic organism that nobody fully understood arrived at Camp Grant from somewhere.

On the first of October, camp records show eight influenza cases. On the second, fifty. On the third, eight hundred. The following week brought more than ten thousand. Soldiers were dying at a rate of seventy-five to one hundred per day.

In five weeks, influenza killed more than fourteen hundred men at Camp Grant. Another three hundred and twenty-three civilians in Rockford died in the same period, and roughly one hundred more in the surrounding county. Schools, churches, theaters, clubs, dance halls, and all public gathering places were closed. Even funerals were prohibited. The city had no framework for a catastrophe of this scale.

Colonel Charles Hagadorn commanded Camp Grant. He was responsible, as commanders are, for the health and welfare of the men under him, and he watched them die in numbers that made that responsibility feel grotesque. On October seventh, Colonel Hagadorn shot himself in the head. He died of that wound.

Two Rockford High School teachers, the sisters Blenda and Anna Kjellgren, volunteered at the camp after the schools closed. Both contracted influenza. Both died, within a day of each other.

The camp was reactivated in nineteen forty-one as a medical training facility and induction center for World War Two. It processed more than one hundred thousand medical personnel. About two thousand five hundred prisoners of war, many of them German, were held there during the war. The camp closed in nineteen forty-six. The site is now occupied by the Chicago-Rockford International Airport.