I recently noticed an old newspaper item that seemed loaded with irony. It ran in 1917, four months before an outbreak of Spanish flu killed over 600,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide. Not knowing the disaster that lay ahead, The St. Louis Star-Times chose to recall a memory from 1867:
In the time of cholera
There were a number of factors that lead to the development of Lafayette Square in the days following the Civil War. One was deadly and highly infectious cholera (“the epidemic.”) It became an annual springtime scourge in St. Louis, and in many Midwest river cities of that time.
Cholera is a disease that follows consumption of food or water contaminated by Vibrio cholera bacteria. Although it can lodge in a host for ten days, most are unaffected. In those sensitive to it, cholera can cause “severe acute watery diarrhea” and kill within hours if untreated.
It’s also highly transmissible, and as most people who contract it show no symptoms, can easily be shed back into an environment of poor sanitation, infecting others. It originally arose in India, but is now endemic in many countries. Even today, it sickens 2.9 million and kills 95,000 people per year globally.
Stage managing a catastrophe
Between 1832 and 1866, the United States experienced three waves of infection. Not understanding its cause or transmission, national and state days or prayer were set. Bad air was considered a culprit, as was sauerkraut and even cucumbers. During an 1849 outbreak in Cincinnati, fires burned at street intersections and a cannon fired every 25 minutes for four hours. Citizens fled the city, which only served to widen the epidemic.
Drinking water was often pulled from shallow wells, rivers or lakes, which lay close to cesspools or streams where sewage was dumped. St. Louis had no sewer system before the 1850s. Major epidemics followed in 1832, 1849, 1866 and the late 1870s.
Local outbreaks were often poorly reported, since epidemics are bad for business. However, the mortality from cholera was significant. From 1832-35, St. Louis lost 500 people. With its prime location on the road West, the impact of mass migration made an outbreak in 1849-1851 exponentially worse. 4,557 died of cholera – somewhere between 5 and 10% of the city’s population.
The cholera outbreak of 1866
As with the rush for California, the end of the Civil War brought extensive movement and relocation. By 1866, the population of St. Louis was 200,000. That year, cholera killed 3,527, representing 40% of the city’s mortality. Almost one of every two cases proved fatal. This outbreak led to the creation of the St. Louis Board of Health. The board wrote and enforced sanitary regulations and monitored polluting industries. It oversaw the creation of a new waterworks near Chain of Rocks in 1871, and a new reservoir at Compton Hill.
In 1866, the spread of disease could be time-lined along the rivers. It struck first in New York City on May 2, moving into Detroit on May 29th, Cincinnati on July 11, and Chicago on July 21. It was St. Louis’s turn in the barrel by late August.
At an August 21 meeting of the city Board of Health, the burial of bodies on Quarantine Island became an issue between the new health commissioner and Mayor James Thomas. Dr. Spiegelhalter chose a sandy spot where “one man could do as much digging as four men could in the place selected by the mayor.” The mayor countermanded Spiegelhalter’s order to dig there. As a result, over seventy unburied bodies piled up on the island. Eventually, the mayor stood down, and burials resumed at the commissioner’s site.
City response to disease and poor press
An issue for city hall resulted from the appointment of sanitary committees for each ward. There was enough reporting of cases and deaths from cholera that “the disease is aggravated by alarming timid persons by the publishing of long lists of those who have died.” This led to the spreading of “exaggerated rumors of the fatality of the disease.” Not good for a city intent on growth, and otherwise proud of its civic progress.
The solution, adopted by the Board of Health, was to rescind the order to report cases to the health office, instead compiling a count of the total dead buried at each cemetery. They adopted another resolution, to “most earnestly request” citizens to avoid joining funeral processions.”
Board of Health meetings with the Board of Aldermen led to increased scrutiny of the city’s drinking water. The superintendent of waterworks reported in late August that the main reservoir took in fresh river water daily, which prevented accumulation of “green scum & etc.” It was “to all appearances, a fine body of wholesome water.” He did add that the condition of the river banks near the intake pipes were “filthy and unsatisfactory. The boats and barges laying up at and above our waterworks should be removed.”
A year later, in July, 1867, the Missouri Republican noted that city law required every southbound river vessel with any sign of onboard cholera or smallpox to land first at Bloody Island. Any vessel that failed to comply, or bypassed the island would be boarded and seized by the mayor and police of St. Louis. This was serious business. The fine for the master of such vessel would be not less than fifty nor more than five hundred dollars.
A little fresh air, or better water
The weekly cemetery report, which had been in place for a year, finally showed signs of a plague on the wane in late August:
Cholera, followed by convulsions and consumption were the leading cause of death. Cholera was directly blamed for only 13% of total mortality. The seasonal epidemic had once again passed. The city lived in fear of what the following year might bring.
Blaming airborne transmission, some sought remedy by moving from the smoky atmosphere of the city to higher, more rural areas nearby, like Lafayette Square (see article at top of essay.)
The American Public Health Administration published a map in 1884 that traced the concentrations of death by cholera in the city during 1866. It’s pretty grim.
Here’s a key for how the map works.
First up is Soulard, an area that in 1866 was old, densely settled, with a lot of businesses and very near the river. Concentration of mortalities was highest along Lafayette Avenue and 1st, 2nd and 3rd Streets near the wharfs.
Perhaps the poorest district in the city, Kerry Patch showed a remarkably even distribution – with the bacterium taking 25-50 of every 1,000 people, regardless of block.
Finally, Lafayette Square, which was just beginning to infill in 1866:
The area appears pretty clean until one looks at City Hospital, with a sad 693 of 1,000 dying. If you represented a cholera case, you were more likely to be carried out, than walk out of City Hospital.
Well, that was less cheerful than intended. Let’s meander a bit, and discuss the ever-changing geography of the Mississippi River at St. Louis.
Islands in the stream, that is what they are
Sand islands have come and gone in the river – the result of changes in the course of the river upstream. The wreck of the steamboat Arabia, which sank in 1856, was located 130 years later. It resided ½ mile inland and 45 feet beneath a Kansas cornfield.
The Mississippi River at St. Louis contained three major islands. These were more sandbars on which trees and shrubs somewhat held against the river’s constant eroding. Bloody Island was the northernmost, with Duncan’s Island just downstream, and Arsenal, or Quarantine Island further south.
Trying to use Quarantine Island to screen or isolate sick travelers heading north by river proved difficult, as the island could slip away in high water.
Geologists term a river striking off on a new path as “meandering.” Harold Fisk of the US Army Corps of Engineers published a folio of Mississippi River maps depicting meanders over time. In the one below, from Cape Girardeau, MO to Donaldsonville, LA, the blue line represents the river flow in 1765, salmon from 1820, green from 1880, and black from 1944, when Fisk drew the maps .
By the 1830s, the river was shifting course toward Illinois. Two islands, Bloody Island just north and Duncan’s Island about parallel with the city, threatened to cut off the riverfront from the river. The federal government stepped in and constructed a wing dam to redirect the river back west, off the southern end of Bloody Island. By the early 1860s, Duncan’s Island had completely washed away.
This left Bloody Island to the north, and Arsenal Island or Quarantine Island to the south of town.
Setting up a screen on Quarantine Island
There’s some ambiguity in trying to explain the exact location of Quarantine Island, or Arsenal Island, as it varied in time. Between 1862 and 1865, the head of the island moved south 300 feet, and another 1,500 feet from then until 1874. It was, when the city purchased it in 1866, approximately opposite the United States Arsenal in about mid-stream. The island extended downriver from there for nearly ¾ mile. At it’s widest point, it was about 1/4 mile across.
Workmen used rough sawn boards to construct isolation units for any cholera stricken passengers headed upstream to St. Louis in 1849.
By 1854, there were concerns that the sand island was washing away just as the city expected an influx of immigration. By then, the island was the screening point to screen those coming north by boat for infectious disease. Bear in mind that there were no bridges across the Mississippi to St. Louis at that point.
This article below from the Globe-Democrat of May 4, 1853 depicts over 20,000 persons passing through screening at the island in a year. Of those, fully a quarter found themselves detained.
During the Civil War, the federal government used the northern part of Quarantine Island as a burial ground. As the island washed away, those graves “scattered from here to the Gulf.”
St. Louis buys an island
By 1866, Quarantine Island assumed an institutional look. The city purchased the island for $33,000, and renamed it Arsenal Island. The plan was to wash away ⅔ of the eastern part of the island, effectively filling in on the western shore. This would allow St Louis to extend its wharf area two miles further downriver. Two large buildings constructed on the island held federal military hospitals. Two other long buildings comprised the city smallpox hospital.
An incidental note from 1866 concerns the employment of a 19 year old Joseph Pulitzer. He was poor and spoke little English, but took a job burying indigent cholera victims for the city on Quarantine Island. Later, Joseph found work as a journalist with the Westliche Post, and by 1872, had assumed a controlling interest in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Meteoric, as careers go!
A first visit to the island by Mayor Thomas, four physicians and several aldermen was uneventful. Perhaps deliberately so. The Missouri Republican of April 30, 1866 reported that “as our acquaintance with smallpox has not been of an intimate character, the medical gentlemen present suggested that our ignorance of its characteristics unfitted us for throwing any light upon the interior arrangements. Our native modesty, therefore, added to a cordial invitation to remain elsewhere had the desired effect.”
So assurances of good management and tidy conditions sufficed for the visiting party. They likely appreciated maintaining their own good health during the visit. The article observed that the 300 acre island appeared nearly barren, besides a scattering of oats and corn, and some neglected fruit trees. They waxed poetic about the future appeal of this land when eventually made part of a unified and verdant riverfront.
Home from the war and into a plague
Quarantine Island was the site of a tragic post-war episode that same year. The 56th Colored Infantry of Arkansas was en route to St. Louis, to muster out of the army. Many of the men fell ill on the ship and were quarantined on the island. Eventually 175 men died of cholera and were buried there. These graves relocated to a mass site at Jefferson Barracks in 1939.
A first hand visit from two M.D.’s of the city health department in July, 1866 left the visitors horrified by the stench, “most stifling, foul and pestilential,” with dirty floors, “the filth having accumulated and dried into hillocks,” and “spittoons which appeared not to have been emptied for many days.” In trying to inspect other wards, they confessed to having to “retire to the door for air.”
Noting improvements to the overall appearance, inspectors later that year were invited by convalescents to witness a bedbug infestation. The inspector lifted a mattress “defiled by all manner of human pollutions… and revolting to every sentiment of decency and humanity,” He counted twenty in a square foot of fabric. The journalists also witnessed insects crawling on the walls and ceiling in large numbers.
And that’s not the worst of it
The most damning aspect of the report was that the patients, when released, “being too poor to procure other clothes” returned to civilization in the same garments they arrived in, “bearing with them the virus of the most loathsome disease in the catalogue.”
Reaching for a sure-fire attention getter, the inspectors related conditions at Quarantine Island to a form of capital punishment in ancient Rome, where an offender was tied to a corpse and left to perish. Being a patient at the smallpox hospital posed a double ordeal as a sick person took a filthy bed that was unchanged after other sick and dying people occupied it. “Struggling with a disease repulsive in itself, but intensified a hundred-fold by such accumulation of concentrated contagion.”
The ensuing report led mayor (and Lafayette Square resident) James Thomas to remove the city health officer from his position. This affected and eventually improved affairs at Quarantine Island, as well as the City Workhouse and House of Refuge.
After the flood
The end came shortly thereafter for Quarantine Island. A flood of the Mississippi River in 1876 seriously damaged the buildings and swept away the markers of 470 Civil War era soldiers buried there. The military remains were reinterred at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.
Beginning in 1876, Illinois built several large railroad dikes in East St. Louis. They effectively threw the current of the Mississippi to the Missouri side, making it the primary river channel.
St. Louis was in a weird spot. It bought Arsenal Island from the U.S. Government for $34,000 in 1866. The city had clear title to land that now reformed itself ever closer to Illinois. The two states bickered over possession all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1891 the court upheld a group of Illinois farmers claim to ownership. It was six miles downstream from where St. Louis originally had claimed it.
By then, it was de facto Illinois anyway. It’s the river that meanders, while making it seem that the island is moving. As you can see, there wasn’t much separating Quarantine Island from its eastern shore in 1898 (at right). The left image shows the same sandbar island in 1853, and its subsequent migration south.
Into the 20th century
Squatters moved in among legitimate land owners, and some then compounded the illegality by subletting to other farmers. A period of feuds, duels and outright murder followed. In 1927, St. Louis requested that the federal government move on the place to bust up the stills operating there. The violence, ownership litigation, and seasonal flooding frightened off any more legitimate development.
As to its final resting place, some good detective work by Angela Y. Walton-Raji on the USCT Chronicle blog revealed a likely spot. Across the Mississippi River from Cliff Cave Park is a tacked on piece of Illinois shoreline meeting the general description.
For the record, Bloody Island, to the north on the Mississippi River, got its name from its predilection for hosting gun duels between politicians. Between 1817 and 1856, there were at least four high profile face-offs; most proving fatal to one or both parties. That island slowly merged into the Illinois side, where it formed part of the East St. Louis rail yards
Resources
World Health Organization for detail on cholera: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cholera gclid=CjwKCAiA_6yfBhBNEiwAkmXy53FX7zmLWsX33aMApgTc1SYH8dkZrcwZ9p_U_odS4E8WPLID87Dx3RoCqJ8QAvD_BwE
National Library of Medicine for cholera statistics in 19th century Midwest: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2394684/
Lion of the Valley, St. Louis, Missouri. Primm; p.266.
Diffusion of Cholera in the US in the 19th Century; G.F. Pyle; Wiley Publishing Co.
The mother of all St Louis cholera outbreaks occurred in 1849. I’ve written previously about this particular wave in an earlier essay here: lafayettesquarearchives.com/1849-the-st-louis-cholera-epidemic/
Cholera on the Plains: The epidemic of 1867 – Kansas State Historical Society Ramon Powers and Gene Younger https://www.kshs.org/publicat/khq/1971/1971winter_powers.pdf
Wikipedia: History of St. Louis 1866-1904. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis
Map of cholera deaths 1866 from the AGS Library Digital Map Collection at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/27117/
More about Harold Fisk and his remarkable Mississippi River maps at https://www.pictureboxblue.com/mississippi-river-maps-harold-fisk/
Saint Louis Historical Infrastructure at https://stlhistoricinfrastructure.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/mississippi-part-1-the-meandering-river/
Information on the 56th Colored Infantry unit from Missouri Gravestones; T.S. Lundberg; April 14 2015, at https://missourigravestones.org/view.php?id=772087
The ultimate fate of Arsenal/Quarantine Island, and its movement from Springfield Greene County Library; compiled by Arthur Paul Moser at https://thelibrary.org/lochist/moser/stlouispl.html
1876 flood of military cemetery from Find a Grave; a website that never ceases to be of value in this kind of archival work. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/106351088/samuel-a-crisel
The USCT Chronicle is a blog dedicated to telling the stories of Black soldiers from the Civil War period. Angela Y. Walton-Raji’s good work on Quarantine Island is here: http://usctchronicle.blogspot.com/2013/12/in-search-of-quarentine-island.html
