The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [118]
I based my summary and description of Memphis history on three very good books written by Memphis historians: Gerald M. Capers’s The Biography of a River Town, Memphis: Its Heroic Age; Paul Coppock’s Memphis Memoirs; and Charles Crawford’s Yesterday’s Memphis. I also included material from Carole Ornelas-Struve and Joan Hassel’s Memphis, 1800-1900, Volume III: Years of Courage and William Sorrels’s Memphis’ Greatest Debate; a Question of Water. The quote about Memphis refusing to take the trouble to distinguish between prosperity and progress came from Sorrels’s book. A few of the specifics—like the fact that Memphis had 115 saloonkeepers—came from newspaper reports at the time.
Information about Charles C. Parsons is held in boxes as part of the Yellow Fever Collection of the Memphis Library. The boxes include letters that he wrote to his wife, as well as general opinions of Parsons. A fellow classmate from West Point described the sort of fanaticism evident on Parsons’s face. Men who served with him during the Civil War described his courage at the Battle of Perryville. There is even a letter from Jefferson Davis to Parsons. I found the sermon Parsons gave on the eve of the 1878 Mardi Gras in a scrapbook that belonged to George C. Harris, whose papers are also held in the Yellow Fever Collection at the Memphis Library. The sermon had been printed in the Ledger newspaper in February 1878, and Harris kept it for his scrapbook. Although I only included part of it, the full sermon can be found in the Harris papers.
Very few photos from that decade exist. In order to create a visual sense of downtown Memphis from a visitor’s point of view, I studied an 1870 map of Memphis drawn by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. The original map is held at the Library of Congress, though copies are in wide circulation. The Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis has vignettes of the Victorian houses along Adams Street—an area now known as Victorian Village—in the Eldon Roark Papers. I also studied architectural drawings of Memphis buildings. I was surprised to find that in addition to the wooden and brick buildings one would expect, Memphis had several grand structures designed by prominent architects. The columns of the Gayoso Hotel, the building-in-progress of the Customs House, the glass-covered Water Works, and an elaborate prison, among others, would offer a stunning view from the river. None of those buildings exist in Memphis today—only the gates of the prison are still standing near the entrance of Mud Island.
I relied on descriptions of the Greenlaw Opera House and the Exposition Building from articles in the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, an excellent resource for details and specifics about any number of subjects relating to Memphis history.
Other sources consulted for descriptions of Memphis, photographs or illustrations were Robert A. Sigafoos’s Cotton Row to Beale Street, Beverly G. Bond and Janann Sherman’s Memphis in Black and White, Robert W. Dye’s Images of America: Shelby County and Ginny Parfitt’s Memories of Memphis: A History of Postcards.
Bright Canary Yellow
It was widely believed in 1878 that the yellow fever epidemic could be traced to the steamer Emily B. Souder, which sparked a number of cases in New Orleans. For a physical description of the Emily B. Souder, its history and to learn its fate, I looked up American Lloyd’s Register of American and Foreign Shipping (1865) and the Record of American and Foreign Shipping (1871)—originals of both documents have been scanned and are available on-line. During that time period, news of a ship’s landing and departure was also printed in the newspaper. As the Souder sailed out of New York, I found references to the ship in the New York Times and ultimately found the most fateful one: the Souder sank in December 1878.
For my account of the Souder’s trip to New Orleans, the deaths of John Clark and Thomas Elliott and the autopsies, I relied on two primary sources: “History of the Importation of Yellow Fever into