SPEAKER_00: 0:11

And now, from the Blue Ridge PBS Studios in Roanoke, Virginia, it's the Virginians of Interest Podcast with your hosts, Brian Campbell and Carthen Curran.

SPEAKER_02: 0:22

Welcome to the Virginians of Interest Podcast. My name is Brian Campbell. My friend Carthen Curran can't be with us today. We're excited to have a special guest with us today, Mr. Lon Wagner. Lon, uh, welcome to the Virginians of Interest Podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 0:33

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

SPEAKER_02: 0:34

Uh tell us a little bit about yourself, Lon.

SPEAKER_01: 0:37

Well, uh, I uh I grew up in uh I was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with Amish people all around. Um uh went to the University of Delaware and studied journalism, and then um I started like a lot of journalists hopping around, you know, from where you can get job wherever you can get the best job. And uh I worked at the Harrisonburg Daily News Record for a while. I worked at the Kingsport Times News in Tennessee for a while, Roanoke Times, and the bulk of my career was at the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk, where I was uh you know, I wrote stories for the front page, for the front of the sports section, for the feature section, human interest, uh, you know, feature profile, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21

Aaron Powell Is it when you I know you know Dwayne Yancey, did you cross paths with Dwayne at the Roanoke paper, I guess then?

SPEAKER_01: 1:26

I worked with uh Dwayne Yancey uh in the mid-90s at the Roanoke Times. And at that time, I mean the Roanoke Times was absolutely a top-notch small newspaper in in America. Um we we sent people to the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, you know, big, big places. Um so they they were doing top-notch work.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51

Well, so at some point you said you transitioned from newspaper work into the work you do now, which is in uh university communications, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01: 1:59

Right. I work in uh University Communications at Virginia Tech, uh especially the College of Science is uh is my my realm.

SPEAKER_02: 2:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:08

And um so I'm kind of uh I'm a very am very, very amateur uh scientist, I guess.

SPEAKER_02: 2:15

Aaron Powell So the main reason you're here today is uh it's funny, we got to know each other uh informally about a year ago because we have a mutual friend. But um and I grew up in the Tidewater area, but you wrote a book about one of the most consequential plagues in American history that took place in Virginia that I was completely unaware of. Uh so d tell me but tell me at what point were you made aware of this plague and what made and I presume this is the first major book you've ever written in your life?

SPEAKER_01: 2:42

First book.

SPEAKER_02: 2:43

All right. So tell me how were you made aware of this and what made you think, aha, this is the this is the great novel that's always been inside me waiting to get out.

SPEAKER_01: 2:51

Well, it's it's a unique uh path. Um I was living in Norfolk working for the paper in the early 2000s, and um, I don't know if you remember Hurricane Isabel came through. Yeah. And a couple of Nor'easters too that were significant. And I lived in a neighborhood surrounded by on three sides by water. And so one day I saw that um the Civic League was having a special meeting because with all this water, our neighborhood was experiencing a rat infestation. And a woman from the City Health Department came to the uh community meeting, and I was like, I bet I better go because I don't want to deal with rats in my house. And um, and so she was she was quite a thing. Uh Norfolk City Health Department. Um, she was in the division of vector control. At the time I didn't know what a vector is, but a vector is an animal that carries a virus from from one thing to another. It could be carrying it from a monkey to another monkey, from a horse to a horse, or from a person to a person. And so mosquitoes and rats are vectors. And this really, I mean, you know, sort of grandmotherly looking woman with a a nice floral dress was up there talking, you know, viciously about how to kill rats. And my neighborhood's really close to ODU. There are a lot of authors and and artists and university faculty in there, pretty liberal neighborhood. And so somebody raises their hand and says, Um, well, is there a humane way that we can get rid of the rats? And this this very kind woman said, Um, well, there's a trap called Have a Heart. You can have a heart now, but you got to kill them sometimes. And I became fascinated with what we dubbed the rat lady. And um, so I thought maybe she would make a story. And so I went back and I did this, you know, I I did a drive around with the rat lady and we we like looked for rat traps on people's property and stuff. And it turned out it really wasn't much of a story. And um so as we were parting, uh, I said, Well, one more question. I said, Why are you so obsessed with quelling rat and mosquito populations? And she says, Well, I'm sure you've heard of the yellow fever epidemic of 1855. And like a lot of people, there's like one place in town where you see a little memorial. Um, but that's all I really knew. So I went back to the paper and I started doing some some looking up, and it seems like a long time ago, but um we even had Google in 2005, by the way. You know, for all the you know, it's been around for a while, right? And um so I pulled up the writings of a minister, a Presbyterian minister who had been in town that summer of 1855 and had made journal notes and documented it and sent these extensively detailed letters to the Virginia Historical Society. Like at some point during the epidemic, he latched onto the idea that this was not just your typical outbreak of disease, that this was going to be possibly a historic thing. And so he composed these letters. And as I sat down and read them, I just kept over and over in my mind, I just kept saying, I can't believe that happened here. And so that was really the beginning 20 years ago of my looking into this. I wrote a big series for the paper at the time. It was really popular. Um, people, we would release it one at a time for 14 days, and we'd get let emails from people that they stayed up late until that release came out at midnight for the next day just to read the next edition. And then I dropped it for many, many years. But I had kept my Google alerts on, and so I kept seeing like mosquito outbreaks, mosquito-borne disease outbreaks. And if you think about it, since you know, in the past 20 years, we've had West Nile, uh, Zika virus almost shut down the Olympics. Uh there's there's currently been dengue fever transmissions in Florida last year, and all of these diseases are carried by the same mosquito that carries yellow fever. Which is the uh the 80s Egypti mosquito, A E-D-E-S, Egyptian like Egyptian.

SPEAKER_02: 7:27

And this mosquito was uh prevalent in but I guess this is gonna get into your book. So that's okay. Part of the problem wasn't necessarily the the problem in Norfolk and Portsmouth at the time, but his ship arriving with people who were sick.

SPEAKER_01: 7:42

Right. And to go back to that, so this mosquito was not uh historically native to North America and South America, but when the slave trade began, mosquitoes hopped on those ships, and so this mosquito populated, you know, um east coast of America, um Central America, Brazil, and and so um in 1855, a ship that was in the West Indies in St. Thomas, now like St. Thomas the Virgin Islands, was a shipping hub where um almost every ship that came from Africa had to go through St. Thomas first and then come up the East Coast. And in the winter of 1855, and and almost every every winter in St. Thomas, um, yellow fever was hopping from ship to ship to ship. And this ship that would later come into Portsmouth uh was in harbor all winter. Um, some of its crew died, and then in May, 170 years ago, it loaded up and came north. And the bad luck part for Virginia was that that ship was bound for New York. Uh along the way, it sprung a leak around the base of its mast. And so the captain tried to like make a run for it to New York. He enlisted male passengers to go down into the cargo hold and and run pumps to bail water out as he was cranking the engines to try to get to New York. But about halfway up the coast, it became apparent they weren't gonna make it. He was familiar with the at that time, I mean now and then, famous ports and famous shipyards of Portsmouth. And he was like, I'm gonna go in there and get the ship fixed. And so that's how that's how that part started.

SPEAKER_02: 9:47

Well, how we get back to the disease again. So, so the mosquitoes had infected were the people that were infected in St. Thomas, or were they had the had this infection occurred in Africa, or where had the infections occurred?

SPEAKER_01: 10:00

So um there were no enslaved people on that particular ship, but they were being brought in all the time to St. Thomas. And so St. Thomas itself, I mean, packed down by the harbor, like really jammed hard against the water there. So it was really not hard to transmit something from person to person. It was a petri dish of absolutely and then all these ships were there, and whatever whatever ship came in, it would infect, you know, likely people on shore, people coming on the ships to offload stuff, enslaved people, whoever. It was, as you said, a petri dish.

SPEAKER_02: 10:46

So when we think of COVID today, you know, because this is a where where did it where's the origin? So so before this thing gets to Portsmouth, wherever the bad stuff related to yellow fever, most likely the origin was whatever whatever happened in St. Thomas ended up in Portsmouth.

SPEAKER_01: 11:01

Well, okay, so a little bit of the book. Um May 27th, 1855, um a crew member came to the chief engineer on the Benjamin Franklin, which was the name of the ship, and he wasn't feeling well. And the chief engineer called the captain, and the captain came and they saw he had all the signs of yellow fever. They gave him a dose of calomel, which was the treatment at the time. It's actually mercury chloride, so it is in fact a purgative, which is what they were going for, but it's not in fact a cure. And people would take the calomel and start like throwing up like crazy theoretically to expel the toxins, and probably a large percentage of the time just the mercury chloride killed them just in itself. It's a poison. Um, so they gave it to this this crew member, he survived, and they had other sick people on board, and they loaded up, and you know a ca a a captain back then was kind of a professional liar. Their job they had one job, and that's to get stuff from point A to point B. And how it gets done doesn't matter. So to load up with sick crew member on board, not tell anybody, no big deal. That's why the engineer came to the captain. They wanted to keep that information loop really closed, um so it wasn't well known. And then also there were probably mosquitoes breeding in the open rain barrels that they stored on deck for drinking water.

SPEAKER_02: 12:48

Well, this is another technical question. Is yellow fever the same as malaria?

SPEAKER_01: 12:52

No, different. Both both spread by the same m same kind of mosquitoes. Okay. But yellow fever is more fatal.

SPEAKER_02: 13:01

Aaron Ross Powell And why is it called yellow fever?

SPEAKER_01: 13:03

What is it is it's um because it it it shuts down your bodily organs and and your liver uh can't process and your bonds. Yeah, your eyes your eyes and your even your skin uh turns yellow.

SPEAKER_02: 13:16

Aaron Ross Powell You So it can't be transmitted human to human, but the mosquito transmits it.

SPEAKER_01: 13:21

Right. In 1855, they they they thought it couldn't be transmitted human to human, but they really weren't sure. So it was a lot like COVID. Like information hadn't come in yet, and um, and so people were scared to talk to other people or to treat other people who had yellow fever.

SPEAKER_02: 13:39

Well, my next question is to get us to Portsmouth, but I don't want to jump ahead of the book. Is it is it logical to get to Portsmouth now and we end to start saying, okay, now what happens in Portsmouth?

SPEAKER_01: 13:48

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 13:49

Let's do it. All right, let's get to Portsmouth.

SPEAKER_01: 13:51

Okay, so um this was not the first yellow fever epidemic in early America by any means. And so every time a ship came towards harbor, they had to, by law, pull over to the side of the shipping channel and wait to be inspected by an appointed health inspector before they could enter the real populous part of town where the ship repair yards were. And so that's what they did on um the night of June 6, 1855, pulled over to the side of the channel. The next day, uh the health inspector, who was a doctor in town who was appointed this job, um, he comes on board the ship and looks around and starts asking questions. And is there any disease on board? Oh no, no, no, no, no disease, no, no crew, no, no, no. Everybody's we're all good, you know. Um well, where's first mate? Well, you know, he can't he can't make it out here right now.

SPEAKER_02: 14:53

Um, you know, so um and there's no looking for mosquitoes because nobody's smart enough now to know that this has been transmitted by mosquitoes. So we're not evolved there yet.

SPEAKER_01: 15:03

Nope, that wasn't discovered for about another 45 years. Okay, gotcha.

SPEAKER_02: 15:07

So they're just looking for sick people.

SPEAKER_01: 15:08

Sick people, yeah. And and you know, this is where the old thing sort of came from, you know, cleanliness is next to godliness. So, you know, if you had a, you know, quote, rat trap of a ship, you know, that was going to raise suspicion. Um, but despite the captain saying, no, no problems on this ship, a ship had come into port earlier uh like that spring from St. Thomas, and they had 60 some cases of yellow fever on that. So the health inspector knew the captain was lying because you know he said, no, no problems anywhere we've been, but we knew that there were. So he says, I'm gonna have to hold you here for a while. I'll come back and inspect, you know, in a few days. And so in the meantime, we can safely assume that they worked like hell to clean the ship up. And also, um there were some people working at a old military fort on shore uh where they could see the ship. And one night they saw uh some people appear on deck and they had a rolled-up mattress and they tossed the mattress over the side and then they scurried over to the far side of the ship and came out in a dinghy and rode away to somewhere. Another night the same work crew was there and a body washed up, and as they described in the report, uh his hands were as yellow as lemons. And a third time um they were there working, and they saw these two guys come out, climb over the rail, sc slide down the ship a little bit, and dive into the river and swim for it. And so they swam to the fort, it was the closest place, and these these fort workers jerked these guys up onto shore, and they're laying there gasping, and one of them says, Um, why did you risk your lives like that? And the the guy who had just you know nearly drowned says, Um we'll take our chances on drowning versus certain death if we stay on that ship. Nonetheless, 12 days later, health inspector comes out, the ship is like glistening in the sun. Um Captain says, No problems, and look, you know, I just want to go into this shipyard, I've already arranged it, get the mast repaired, and we'll be on our way. And so health inspector says, Okay, um, but you cannot break out your cargo hold under any conditions. And so they go into port and they tie up at the shipyard, and the captain dumps the bilge water and breaks out the cargo hold and sends people down into the bottom.

SPEAKER_02: 18:15

And the threat is the mosquitoes, not not the crew or anything else.

SPEAKER_01: 18:19

Well, you know, so the crew, like, if a crew member has yellow fever at that time and it's gestating, um, then the mosquitoes, like so the crew member goes in town into Portsmouth because the health inspector said, I understand your crew needs some R. They can go into town, get some food and drink, you know. So so let's say a crew member is in infected with the virus and he goes into town and a mosquito bites him. Um, set about seven to ten days later, that mosquito will then have absorbed the alkal fever virus, and the next people that it bites will then get yellow fever.

SPEAKER_02: 19:03

Aaron Powell So the transmitter is still the mosquitoes. So so it's not that the reason it became it spread so crazy in Portsmouth wasn't because of the crew, it was because of the mosquitoes they were carrying.

SPEAKER_01: 19:14

That was the real I mean not entirely. Not entirely. So so those mosquitoes were what they say, you know, they weren't really, really native to that area, but they were endemic at that time.

SPEAKER_02: 19:24

Gotcha. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 19:25

So there are there are essentially native 80s Egypt eye mosquitoes on the ground in Portsmouth. There are 80s Egypt eye mosquitoes on the ship in the in the water. But when a crew member goes into town and is walking around among everybody in these mosquitoes, just think of it as somebody carrying like a Wi-Fi hotspot. Wherever he goes, it's a viral hotspot. Gotcha. And can spread that to any mosquitoes that bite him.

SPEAKER_02: 19:55

So that's that's the point then. So yeah, so that's so that's the next part that I'm curious about because I guess that um on the cover of your book, you talk about it's one of the biggest plagues when you look at it in terms of impact in American history. So how did it then so that how did that happen? So then first of all, it's a port town, right? So it's you know, it's Portsmouth is a you know, it's a it's like America in 1855. Portsmouth is a pretty big, booming, you know, water town, right? So so these people show up, they're glad to get off the ship because they're all pent up and the mass is getting fixed and everybody's going on about their business. But slowly but surely these mosquitoes are doing their thing, right? Amongst the sick population. And then these mosquitoes go on to bite other people. Absolutely. Amongst the general population, not sailors. Right. And other people start getting sick.

SPEAKER_01: 20:38

Absolutely. So vector, right? They're they're of a they're the vector of the disease. Yeah. Um so everybody thought it was okay for a while. Um that was June 19th when they came and tied up at the little shipyard, which unfortunately was a few hundred feet from the Portsmouth Navy Yard, where which which was a significant American facility at that time. I mean, as things bubbled with possible civil war, I mean, the leaders of the South and the leaders of the North knew that the naval shipyard in Portsmouth was a major asset. It employed 1,500 people, had the first dry dock ever in the United States, um, and it was right down the street. So this is a this is a threat, right? Um, so everybody's watching, but they think they've kind of like they've kind of sailed past this one um because the ship docked on June 19th, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. And then um on Independence Day, there was a shipworker named Carter who went out with his buddies to uh Fort Monroe, um, old Old Point Comfort, it was, uh, to just party, be on the beach and party. And um the next day, July 5th, Carter doesn't show up for work. And everybody's like, Yeah, well, you know, he was over at Old Point Comfort, you know, throwing down, so you know, he probably just couldn't couldn't get up, you know. And uh, and then on the sixth, he doesn't come in, and on the seventh, he doesn't come in, and on the eighth, they go and essentially do what we call what a safety check or something these days.

SPEAKER_02: 22:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:19

And um, and he's he's on his deathbed.

SPEAKER_02: 22:21

Jaundist.

SPEAKER_01: 22:22

Yeah. And they send three Navy doctors over to like check him out because I mean, the Navy, they travel over the world, they've seen all the tropical diseases. And um, the Navy doctors, I don't they they press on his chest and some he expels some some horrible fluids, and that's that's black vomit that you get from yellow fever. It's like a famous term for yellow fever. Um and it's it's obviously that this guy has yellow fever, and that's when like the panic in the town just erupts.

SPEAKER_02: 22:59

The poop hits the fan.

SPEAKER_01: 23:00

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 23:02

And then what happens? Because in 1855, I presume we're not we don't have the CDC and um national television, and I mean what is what does epidemiology look like in 1855?

SPEAKER_01: 23:13

Well, it's interesting. So this Presbyterian minister who stays behind, after it pops up in Portsmouth, and again, this is like this is early in the transmission cycle, things become you know, things boom after this. But this is like it takes a while for seven to ten days to infect a mosquito and everything. So the people over in Norfolk, Portsmouth had about 10,000 people at that time, Norfolk had 16, 16,000, and they were all both sides just packed down by the river, because that's where all the action is, right? I mean, you don't have you don't have big interstates, the interstate is the river. Yeah, and so you want to be as close to that as you can. And so Norfolk's over there, they're watching. Like, can we keep it on the other side of the river? And this this minister, this Presbyterian minister, interestingly, he had started out as a chemistry professor at Washington College, now Washington and Lee. So he had like a scientific mind. And so he starts looking at things like which direction the winds were prevailing and how far it is from one infection to the next and stuff, and trying to wonder if it's gonna hop over to uh Norfolk. And um, and so people are people are just like mid-July, they're just kind of everybody's really on edge, but they still are hopeful that maybe this is not going to be a devastating visit from yellow fever. And then what happens? Okay. Um so there's a place in Portsmouth. This is all this I mean the the fascinating history here is this touches on so many things, including uh if you remember, the Irish potato famine really happened in the mid to late 1840s. Okay. So Irish immigrants had flooded into this country like crazy in the years that preceded 1855. There uh more than a million, I think it was 1.7 million Irish immigrants in a decade. Um and they didn't just all go to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, right? Or and and Savannah. Um a lot of them, they came to where the work was, and the work was at the shipyards in Portsmouth. And so there were tenement houses packed with Irish immigrants and their families um right along the water in Portsmouth. And um the first three pri like private non-shipworking citizens who were like in tenements about two hundred feet from this ship, they got sick. And so in order to in order to try to prevent this from spreading, the town started kicking people out, and people were afraid too. They didn't the Irish didn't want to be in a tenement where people were dying of yellow fever. So some of them took the ferry over to Norfolk and stayed with their friends in other Irish tenements over in Norfolk. And on here you'll get you'll get some uh you'll get some some flash forwards of to COVID, right? Um on July 17th, a doctor named George Upsher in Norfolk uh had treated enough patients, and he came out and said, I've I've treated enough people with this now to proclaim that yellow fever is is on the loose in Norfolk. And um Upshur was lambasted uh by one group of people for waiting too long to say anything, and lambasted by the other group of people for saying anything at all. And they nicknamed it jokingly Upshur's disease instead of yellow fever. They're like, oh yeah, you got a case of Upsher's disease. You know, so this guy this same thing happened in China um with the doctor who first identified COVID in early 2020.

SPEAKER_02: 27:33

I mean Well, I would also think it's probably because it's economics, right? So if all the Irish are suddenly not showing up at work at the shipyards, then people are thinking, wait a minute, we got to get people back. So in other words, the same dynamics we experienced with COVID, it's just in 1855.

SPEAKER_01: 27:46

Right, exactly. I mean, you can have like scientific advancements that just really could could fix the world, um, but human nature uh tends to override that.

SPEAKER_02: 27:57

And of course, we as you said too, we still don't know for another 40 years that this is a mosquito-borne thing. So at some point, people are probably assuming, I guess, that it's some sort of a a contact, a human-to-human contact thing or something that in close quarters, if I get up on the other side of the river, I'd I'll be away from it.

SPEAKER_01: 28:13

Well, so this is some of this is some work, but um so to get technical, uh Louis Pasteur's uh germ disease theory did not exist in 1855. And even, you know, the scientific method where you start with a hypothesis and you go th through certain steps to prove things did not also exist. Um what people thought spread disease was foul smelling air. Nice, bad air.

SPEAKER_02: 28:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:44

And so um the call went out to clean up. You gotta clean up, you gotta, you know, like the ship.

SPEAKER_02: 28:50

Yeah, just if we get it cleaned up, it'll be better.

SPEAKER_01: 28:53

It will be better. We gotta get rid of the bad smells. Yeah. If we get rid of the bad smells, then there won't be disease. And so that was the only thing they did. They they um they would burn, they would put tar in barrels all around town and um and burn tar barrels to chase away whatever was bad in the air. Um, they spread like powdered lime all over the streets, you know, to to clean up the streets. And um, I mean, it must have been a real hellscape, right? Because it would rain. So you got like lime running everywhere, and you got this these smoking tar barrels. I mean, you can imagine just like a movie scene.

SPEAKER_02: 29:36

And is there is there does anybody recover from this, or is it just pretty much a death sentence?

SPEAKER_01: 29:40

It's not a death sentence. Um in 1855, one out of three people died, which makes it really the the reason it's the most fatal epidemic in America because of the death rate, not because I mean, more people died in the 1919 flu epidemic. I get these emails, you know, and that's that is correct. A a bigger raw number of people died in the United States. But the population in the United States was 106 million and fewer than a million people died in the flu epidemic. I'll take my chances on that percentage versus one out of three. Right. And so, and and so some of them probably right now, um, still to this day, the only treatment for an active case of yellow fever is what they call supportive care. You make sure the person is comfortable and you try to keep them hydrated. Um, they didn't know that then. They were still giving out, you know, calomel mercury chloride, which probably straight up killed some people. Um, they were terrified to treat people because they didn't know. I mean, it could be spread person to person. Maybe, you know, at the time. Nothing had proved that it wasn't. Um so there were people who died of just dehydration. They weren't people were scared to bring them water or ice. Um, so that I think that's why the fatality rate was so much higher these days. Um if you get yellow fever, uh, you have about the fatality rate is between 15 and 20 percent.

SPEAKER_02: 31:12

What's the standard of care now?

SPEAKER_01: 31:14

Same. There, there's no um they there is a vaccine, um, which my daughter just traveled to Ecuador and she got the yellow fever vaccine. Okay. Um, so there's a preventative, and if you have that vaccine, or if you've gotten yellow fever and survived, um, you should be good to go for the rest of your life. Um, but once you get it, it the care is the same. Like keep them hydrated and keep them comfortable and hope for the best.

SPEAKER_02: 31:41

And not uh give them mercury. No, no mercury.

SPEAKER_01: 31:43

Well that's that's good treatment.

SPEAKER_02: 31:44

All right, so we're not Upshur now. So has it reached its uh its apex yet?

SPEAKER_01: 31:48

Oh no, no, no, no. Okay. Um it's just again, the transmission cycle is is just starting. Um now uh there's so many great characters in the book, too. It's not somebody asked me, um, I I don't know how they phrased it, but is it a history book with like dates and numbers in it, or is it a story? And it's absolutely a story. Uh there are some great characters in it, and one of them is the mayor of the town named Hunter Woodis. And sort of shockingly, he's an Irish Catholic because people didn't like Irish at the time. Um, we tend to not like whatever is the most prominent, you know, group of immigrants in our country at an at any time in history, and it was Irish then. Um so anyway, somehow this Irish Catholic uh mayor gets elected, and he's a young guy, he's got lots of energy, he's 33 years old, um, seems to be beloved by everybody, and his mission is to keep yellow fever contained in the Irish tenements, which are called Barry's Row in in Norfolk. And so he um he helps build uh like a 16-foot-tall board wall around the tenements and they station sentries there so that nobody can come or go. And uh except the mosquitoes. Right, right. So Upsher, he's like he's got a good wit, and um he refers to this this uh barricade as the Woodest Board of Health, which I thought was really funny. Yeah. Um so they go out, they try to they try to stop it this way, and of course, like you say, you you can't stop mosquitoes from flying over a you know 16-foot wall, and um and it starts to spread in normal.

SPEAKER_02: 33:43

And as you just described, the more people get sick with this, the more mosquitoes bite the sick people, and then they go on to bite other people, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 33:51

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. People use the word exponential uh incorrectly sometimes, but it truly is an exponential situation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 34:01

So how long does this go on and when does it reach its apex?

SPEAKER_01: 34:06

Um trying to think of touchstones along the way. Um uh on on August, uh early August, this the minister George Armstrong starts writing his letters, and um at the end of one of his letters, he says, Well, I've I've spoken to my wife and um and we've discussed it, and we've decided that I need to stay in town to fulfill my obligations. And she uh said the family should remain together. So people are making decisions. It's kind of like having lived over there, it's kind of like when a hurricane is forecast for five days.

SPEAKER_02: 34:43

Stay and write your social security arm on your arm.

SPEAKER_01: 34:46

Right. But you'll hear fam families have the discussion like fatalistic. Should we go or no, we're gonna stay here and ride it out together? You know, it's the same conversation.

SPEAKER_02: 34:56

But they but enough news is going on in 1855 to know that if you're in Williamsburg, people aren't dying in Williamsburg. So if you get to Williamsburg, you're likely to be better off than even if you go live on the streets than than staying in Norfolk.

SPEAKER_01: 35:08

Right. So early on on this day um that we're recording this, August 1st, um, in 170 years ago, um, quarantines went up against these cities. Um Richmond, Philadelphia, New York, any city up and down the East Coast said, um, we're not accepting people or ships from any of the from Portsmouth and Norfolk. Um, you guys are on your own. Um but didn't shut the shipping didn't shut down right away. So people who had any money rushed to get the heck out of town. Um there's a scene um described by several people in early August at the ferry wharf in at the boat wharf in Portsmouth. And it's early in the morning, the sun's barely up. I mean, you can imagine this, right? There's like tar barrels on the street that are smoking, and as as the sun's coming up, there's people converging out of all the side streets and alleys and stuff and walking down the main street, and they've got like they're they're toting like their worldly possessions, they're they're grabbing their kids and they're hurry-scurrying down the street, you know, to get the heck out of there to get to a boat. And um, and the the the Portsmouth Common Council president says he's never seen anything like the rush at the boat wharf that morning as people were pushing and shoving to get on this boat to get out of town. So who would be left behind? Um well, so the quarantines were not flawless. At one point, um, the Presbyterian minister writes about like how he thinks it's he's he says, you know, in a country as connected as ours, which is funny because we think of it as like really a primitive time, but you know, they had railroads, railroads were being built, and and really these these shipping connections were were vast. I mean, you could take um you could take a ship any day to Richmond, you could take three times a week to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York.

SPEAKER_02: 37:17

I mean, you were not over to Fort Well Point Comfort for Fourth of July.

SPEAKER_01: 37:21

Absolutely, and that was that was super easy, right? Yeah. 20-minute boat ride. Um so anyway, Armstrong kind of laughs, like, you know, you can't you can't keep us here, you know. So he says a case about people would take a boat, um, they would get over to the eastern shore, and then they would come back to Norfolk and hop on a Baltimore or Philadelphia boat as if they were an Eastern Shore resident. Uh that's how they would get out of town, right? Um relabel themselves. Other steamers would come, okay, we can't touch there, so they would touch five miles away. And um, and then when they would get to New York, where where did you touch? Oh, we didn't touch in Portsmouth. Um the culprit still not being the person but being the mosquito. Right. Yeah, right. But they didn't again, they didn't know that.

SPEAKER_02: 38:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 38:11

Um, so that's when really panic set in, and about um 70, 75% of people fled town. Some people went to the really well off, I mean, they didn't have a bad summer. They went to these springs resorts that at the time were in western Virginia, are now in West Virginia. Um, like the homestead is one of them, but there were a dozen of them, red sulfur springs and sweet springs and all that, um, on this card or they would go over there and get a room for the summer, and they'd have nice meals, they'd have dances and music in the evenings, they'd do the springs, and they just waited it out. Um, poor people, um, whether freed um enslaved people or or enslaved people, they're stuck there, right? Um, doctors and ministers felt like they had to stay to help. Um, so that's kind of who was left in town.

SPEAKER_02: 39:17

What do you do with the bodies?

SPEAKER_01: 39:21

Um at first.

SPEAKER_02: 39:23

American history. And I thought, and I asked I asked some other people who actually grew up in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, they said, we've never heard of this either. And I thought, how is this possible that this uh story is not more widely known? So this has been a real tree lawn. Um I'm I have not read the book, but I'm going to go back and read it now. Uh and I encourage other people to do it. How um first of all, anything else you want to add about the book or about the story before you tell people how to access the book?

SPEAKER_01: 39:47

Well, I would just say that um in 1855, uh this wasn't a Virginia story, this was a national story. It was covered in the New York Times, all other newspapers uh in the country. Um you can think of it, all eyes were on Norfolk like they were on Western North Carolina during Hurricane Kalene, or like they were on the California wildfire fires. This was the story that year. Um you can get the book any and my publisher has done a great job of getting it out there. So uh Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Um, if you're over in uh Norfolk, um, you can get it at Prince Books. I like to support the local businesses. But if you just go to lawnwagner.com, I've got multiple places on there that you can buy it.

SPEAKER_02: 40:35

And the book is called The Fever.

SPEAKER_01: 40:37

The Fever. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 40:39

Correct. Lawn Wagner and the Fever. Um Look, this has been terrific. I mean, I would we've got you sounds like you've had an interesting life. We could have you on to talk about other things, but thank you for and all this because of Hurricane Isabel and the rats.

SPEAKER_01: 40:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_02: 40:51

Absolutely. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 40:55

And just go into a civic league meeting. How often does that happen?

SPEAKER_02: 40:58

Yeah, to chase the rat lady in the floral dress that uh talked about vector control. What a terrific intro to that, too. So look, it's been lovely to have you today, and we're gonna appreciate you for coming.

SPEAKER_01: 41:06

Thanks, Brian.

SPEAKER_02: 41:07

Thank you for listening to the Virginians of Interest Podcast. If you like what you've heard today, please download, subscribe, and like our podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 41:14

Thank you for listening to the Virginians of Interest Podcast. To hear other episodes of this podcast, head to Virginiansofinterest.com.