The most fatal plague in U.S. history, here in Virginia?

Somehow, not many people know the story of, perhaps, the greatest non-wartime disaster to ever occur in Virginia. It’s been buried by the historic dust of time, by memories of blizzards, hurricanes, and fires, by inventions like airplanes and interstates, and early on, by Virginia’s cities, farms, and valleys becoming the battlegrounds of the Civil War.

It was interesting to read Kevin Myatt’s column about the mythology of Hurricane Camille in Cardinal News last month, with part of the storm’s legacy being that it has been featured in 11 books. The story of a much deadlier catastrophe, an 1855 yellow fever epidemic in Norfolk and Portsmouth, nearly vanished from the annals of Virginia and U.S. history. Until my book, “The Fever,” was released last month, the epidemic that killed more than 3,000 people had not been featured in a single book.

What time nearly erased was merely this: an epidemic that completely shut down a critical East Coast port for an entire summer and fall, sent thousands of residents fleeing in fright, and wiped out the cities’ emerging leadership class — a railroad founder, bank presidents, city officials, the postmaster, newspaper editors, and hundreds of shipyard workers and their families. One family of 12, every single member, was snuffed from existence.

And it started, as nearly everything started in America’s first couple of centuries, with a ship.

On June 7, 1855, a stately three-masted ship named the Benjamin Franklin steamed off the ocean, around a bend, and up the Elizabeth River, which provides a deep harbor between Norfolk and Portsmouth. For the Virginia port cities, the ship’s arrival was pure bad luck: The Benjamin Franklin had been bound for New York but sprung a leak in its hull on the way up the East Coast. The captain detoured into Hampton Roads for repairs. As was the custom of the day, the ship anchored down river from the populated part of the cities until it could be cleared by a health inspector to enter the harbor.

The health inspector, a doctor appointed by the city council, took a small boat out to the ship in quarantine and met with the captain.

“Has there been any sickness on board?” the inspector asked.

“None,” the captain replied. “Both passengers and crew have been perfectly healthy for the ten-day voyage.”

“Everyone? Every single crew and passenger?”

“Well,” the captain conceded. “I lost two men, the first a fireman who died suddenly, I supposed from a heart attack. He had taken suddenly with a sharp pain in the left side.”

The second man, the captain said, had died of heat and exhaustion after shoveling coal into the boilers. But after 12 days in quarantine, the health inspector cleared the ship to enter the harbor to repair a leaking mast.

Everything in the harbor seemed fine for a couple of weeks. Then, a worker who had been sent into the ship’s hold came down with a mysterious sickness. After Navy doctors — familiar with tropical diseases from their work around the globe — pronounced the ship worker’s case yellow fever, panic spread through the residents of Portsmouth and Norfolk. At that time, no one knew that mosquitoes caused yellow fever, but they knew the virus tortured its victims like almost nothing else. And they knew the only way to avoid getting it was to get the heck away from it.

So, the residents who had money fled. They caught steamers to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and traveled to the springs resorts in western Virginia. At one point, the Richmond Dispatch newspaper reported that more than 300 refugees from the outbreak had passed through Fincastle in Botetourt County. Proportional to Virginia’s population which was about 1.5 million in 1850, today those 300 people passing through Fincastle would be about 1,500 to 1,800. That would be noticeable.

Residents feared that every steamer to depart Norfolk and Portsmouth would be the last. One early-August morning in Portsmouth, before the sun had risen, it seemed like every man, woman, and child in the town was on the move. Wherever a side road or alley intersected with the main street, families appeared apparition-like through gray fumes of smoldering tar barrels, set on fire to keep the “bad air” away. Cart wheels rattled over cobblestones, dogs barked, neighbors hollered as they bustled, creating a swirling cacophony of fright.

They raced each other to the wharf to catch, perhaps, the last boat out. “I have never before witnessed such a scene in the way of panic as was exhibited this morning at the railroad wharf,” Winchester Watts, president of the Portsmouth Town Council, wrote to his brother.

Even before the boat was lashed to the wharf, the mass of people surged toward it. Watts feared people would be crushed against the rail.

Then, the quarantines went up: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, even nearby Suffolk banned people from the two cities. The commandant of Fort Monroe, a military outpost between Norfolk and Hampton in the Chesapeake Bay, stationed bayonet-wielding guards at his piers to make sure residents from the “infected” cities couldn’t land.

With that, it became a cruel science experiment. A trapped population, with no idea what was stalking them. Hardly any people were immune, so the virus spread like wildfire. They’d have to try to survive for two and a half hot months until frost would quell the mosquitoes.

All that mattered was if a person would live or die. And one out of every three people who remained in town that summer died.

Yes, the flu epidemic of 1918 to 1920 killed an estimated 550,000 — but out of 106 million residents. You’d have to go back to the Black Plague of the Middle Ages to find a virus that wiped out more than one-third of the population.

As Norfolk’s acting mayor, N.C. Whitehead, wrote to the volunteer doctors in late September of 1855: “The annals of our civilization furnish no authentic record of a visitation of disease as awfully severe as that which we have just encountered.”

Nearly 170 years later, even after our struggles with COVID, the 1855 epidemic has no parallel.

Lon Wagner, a former Roanoke Times and Virginian-Pilot reporter, is author of “The Fever: The Most Fatal Plague in American History.”

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