The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [20]
Police with shotguns stood along the train tracks of the Mississippi and Tennessee railroads at Whitehaven Station, eight miles outside of the city. The Charleston railroad at Germantown, a good twelve miles away, was quarantined. Cotton, sugar and coffee shipments were held, and all river ports closed with posted shotguns, citizens, believing as they did, that firearms and willpower might be enough to barricade disease.
The board resolved to meet every Monday night at 8:00 during the yellow fever excitement, and Dr. Erskine would purchase barrels of Calvert’s No. 5 carbolic acid to use as disinfectant. Nonetheless, the quarantine did little to ease the minds of the people. Restless in the quiet before the storm, Memphians seemed to feel the epidemic long before any confirmed cases of disease surfaced. Bank accounts were cashed out, letters were written to relatives in other cities announcing plans to visit, businesses kept shorter hours. The heat always made it difficult to sleep, but now worry added to the collective insomnia. Even the animals furthered the subtle sense of hysteria. Throughout the town, people noted that pets and farm animals had been running away; the birds had stopped chirping. The only life-forms unfazed were the unusually high number of striped house mosquitoes.
July had also been a month of exciting, if not strange, occurrences. First a well-known citizen had been crushed beneath a streetcar amid all the celebration and festivities on July 4; another had been struck by lightning just a week later. Streetlamps explodedand caught fire, while mules fell dead of heat stroke in the fields. Citizens gathered downtown to listen to a technological breakthrough, the Edison speaking phonograph. Then, it was reported that a five-and-a-half-foot rattlesnake had been killed in Memphis. The strangest of all, however, was the approaching solar eclipse. In a fit of brevity, there had even been two new cocktails created that July—one was called the Quarantine, the other the Eclipse. The Quarantine, it was said, would isolate and insulate from all other drinks; the Eclipse would shut out what your neighbors are taking in theirs.
For those who followed the stars, the solar eclipse would occur during the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent carrier, and the little-known thirteenth zodiac. Ophiuchus is the only constellation based on a real man, a doctor who lived in ancient Memphis, Egypt, and a solar eclipse under his sign was said to bring disease and struggles between life and death. Another solar eclipse happened under his watch in Philadelphia in 1793 just before an outbreak of yellow fever. That epidemic, one historian wrote, “ushered in the longest and deadliest string of yellow fever years yet known in North America.”
On the afternoon of July 29, Memphians braved the ninety-degree heat to stand in the streets and along the bluffs at 4:28 in the afternoon. They held opera glasses and smoked glass heavenward and watched the moon cross the sun. An onyx sphere crept partway across the bright light, and to the spectators on the bluffs of Memphis, there seemed little question as to which was stronger as the dark eclipsed the light. It was like dusk had suddenly descended upon the city.
When yellow fever first arrived on the streets of Memphis, it did so silently. On July 21, a man arrived off of a riverboat to visit his wife who worked as a cook at 279 Second Street. The Victorian home was the downtown residence of Attorney General G.P.M. Turner. The man fell feverish, but soon recovered. Ten days later, Turner’s two children burned with