Walter Reed Lived Here

Two hundred feet south of this marker once stood the home where Walter Reed lived as a young man, before he became one of the most important figures in the history of American medicine. Born in Virginia in eighteen fifty-one, Reed arrived in this North Carolina community early in life and later went on to serve as an Army physician on the western frontier. In nineteen hundred, he headed the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba, conducting the controlled experiments that proved once and for all that yellow fever is spread by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, not by contaminated clothing or contact with the sick.

His findings allowed Army sanitary officers to drive yellow fever out of Havana within about a year. Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington carries his name. This quiet North Carolina town was part of his story.