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By Root 318 0

the superintendent of health of Iredell County, an area of low ridges and valleys known for its loamy soil and its many creeks. Most of the citizens were North Carolina natives, like their mothers and fathers before them. Long himself carried on the medical practice established by his father in Statesville, an old town of wide, elm-lined streets that served as the county seat. In the past twenty years, the hum of industry had altered the rhythm of life in the Piedmont. Farming families and respectable townspeople like the Longs had had to accustom themselves to growing numbers of wage earners and outsiders. Apart from farming wheat, the people now spent their days making furniture, processing tobacco, tending textile machines, working on the railroads, and, as ever, raising families. Until the winter of 1898, most folks in Iredell County had never seen a case of smallpox. Then that, too, changed.2

Harvey Perkins was fifty-seven years old that February, when he left his home in Pelzer, South Carolina, and traveled some one hundred and fifty miles north and east to seek work on the Mocksville & Mooresville extension of the Southern Railway. He arrived, the fever already upon him, at Neal’s Camp, one of the turn-of-the-century South’s ubiquitous railroad construction camps. He spent the night in a hut with two other laborers. As Long explained, patients in the preeruptive stage of smallpox already battled their unseen foe: “The pulse is strong, full and bounding. . . . The patient is restless and distressed and when sleep is possible has frightful dreams.” When morning broke, Perkins noticed the first spots on his face. Guessing at their significance, and fearing that his new bosses would confine him in quarantine, he left camp without a word and slipped into the woods.3

All Harvey Perkins wanted was to get home to Pelzer, maybe by picking up a train in Charlotte, forty miles south of Neal’s Camp. By the time Perkins walked the twelve miles to Mooresville, in southern Iredell County, the eruption was visible to anyone who cared to look him in the face. But a sick old black man did not usually attract much notice, especially from white people. Perkins spent the night. He resumed his journey the next day. He was just two miles from Charlotte when his strength finally gave out and he “fell by the wayside.” A pair of bicyclists found him in the woods, his face and body covered with pocks. Perkins warned them not to come near. Local authorities transported him to the city pesthouse, a makeshift isolation hospital on the outskirts of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County, where Perkins discovered he was not alone. Dr. Long had not, in fact, begun at the beginning.4

Smallpox had been stalking North Carolina’s southern border for months, maybe longer. Health officials in the lower South thought the disease confined to the African American sections of a few cities and to the dispersed settlements of black farmers, laborers, and families. Since the end of slavery, the white medical profession had paid African Americans little notice and offered little aid. Within the past year or so, smallpox had broken out, seemingly without warning, in parts of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Some white physicians and laypeople dismissed the disease as a peculiar negro malady: “Nigger itch,” they called it. But Dr. Long and other seasoned public health officials knew better. “So far the disease has been almost exclusively confined to negroes,” said the Kentucky Board of Health, in a circular titled “Warning Against Smallpox,” “but this exemption of the white race cannot long be hoped for if it continues to spread.”5

In late January, the North Carolina Board of Health issued a smallpox bulletin. The “justly dreaded disease” had crossed the state line. Wilmington, the state’s largest city, had the dubious honor of reporting the first case, in “a negro train hand of the Atlantic Coast Line whose run was into South Carolina.” Soon after, Charlotte health authorities discovered a case in a black railroad hand