The Yellow Fever Summer: Eighteen Fifty-Five

The summer of eighteen fifty-five arrived with heat and with death. By June seventh, cases of yellow fever were appearing in Norfolk, brought, it was later determined, from the Caribbean aboard a ship that had docked in port. The city had no real public health apparatus, no germ theory to guide it, and no way to understand that the mosquitoes breeding in its cisterns and water barrels were the engine of the disaster.

The epidemic spread through the dense neighborhoods near the waterfront. Those with means fled the city. Those without stayed. By September, five thousand people were infected. The final death toll in Norfolk and neighboring Portsmouth combined reached approximately three thousand two hundred, out of a combined population that may not have been much larger than that.

What stayed in the memory of survivors was not only the dying but the people who chose to remain. The Sisters of Charity, a Catholic religious order, came to Norfolk to nurse the sick at a moment when flight would have been entirely understandable. The Howard Association, a benevolent organization, coordinated care and resources throughout the epidemic. Ministers, physicians, and ordinary neighbors, some of them knowing they would likely contract the fever themselves, stayed because they could not bring themselves to leave.

The epidemic ended when the first killing frosts of autumn arrived and the mosquitoes died. Norfolk buried thousands in the space of a single summer. The city recovered, but the memory of that summer shaped its sense of itself for a generation, a place that had been tested to its foundations and had not entirely broken.