1918 flu epidemic ended as quickly as it struck locally
A front-page story on the Oct. 4, 1918, edition of the Washington Reporter about the flu epidemic
An advertisement mentioning the flu epidemic that ran in the Washington Reporter October 4, 1918
Anne Madarasz
During the evening of Oct. 3, 1918, the telegraph wires across Pennsylvania crackled to life.
An urgent notice was being sent out to all the commonwealth’s communities – all the sites of “public amusement” were being ordered to close. That included saloons, dance halls and “motion picture establishments.” In downtown Washington, it meant that the Casino Theater had to cancel its plans for a performance by “Pete the Wonderful Dog,” who was set to play football with the audience during a Saturday matinee, and the Strand had to call off its screening of the movie “In Judgment Of,” whose stars were Anna O. Nelson and Franklin Farmer.
The dispatch from the State Health Commission didn’t filter through the Washington community until the following morning because the downtown telegraph office had already closed by the time the word went out from Harrisburg. But it surely provided another source of worry for residents who had been bombarded in recent days with headlines about the battle in France’s Argonne Forest that was bringing World War I to a bloody climax, and reports of the deaths of local young men like Vitold Tarassuck, John McClelland and Edward K. Marshall in that conflict.
Washington’s downtown, and others like it, became ghost towns because of the H1N1 virus, with its genes in some species of bird.
In other words, Pennsylvania towns both large and microscopic were brought to heel by the flu.
The 1918 flu pandemic that swept across the globe remains the modern benchmark for deadly outbreaks of illness. Across the world, it killed somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people, well exceeding the entire toll of World War I and such later atrocities as the Holocaust, the crimes perpetrated by Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union and the killing fields created under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime. More than 600,000 Americans died as a result of the flu, including 4,500 in Pittsburgh. Across the world, it infected about 500 million people.
Though the strain of flu didn’t vary greatly from later strains that took far fewer lives, the 1918 flu pandemic was so lethal as a result of World War I, and the movement and intermingling of people that resulted from it. Overcrowded cities, inadequate sanitation and substandard nutrition also played their parts in fueling the flu’s deadly rampage.
“Like a runaway freight train, it burst on the world scene without warning, spreading death and misery in its wake, only to disappear as quickly as it had arrived,” according to historian Kenneth A. White in the July 1985 edition of The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine.
Despite the stern warning from the State Health Commission, the flu had yet to fully manifest in Washington at the beginning of October 1918. The Washington Reporter noted closing the moviehouses and taprooms would “mean much loss to the managers of these places, but all have readily complied with the order, knowing that it is one of the steps necessary to prevent the spread of the disease, which is taking such a heavy toll of death around the country.”
In the days ahead, teachers were urged to ventilate their classrooms, make sure each child had their own individual drinking cups and implore children to use handkerchiefs if they sneezed. Children were also being allowed to play outside during the school day, breaks that were described as “not only preventative measures, but an incentive to better work … They run and play and breathe in plenty of good, crisp fall air. The doors of the school are thrown open, the windows lifted, and when the children return to their room, they feel fine.”
Within a week of the State Health Commission’s order, its impact on Washington was still mild, even as most public places remained closed, and football games, like the match-up of West Virginia University and University of Pittsburgh, were called off. The Washington Reporter noted “some of the amusement houses are getting anxious as to the time of opening. To them, each day means considerable monetary loss.”
Anyone who believed Washington County was going to escape the pandemic soon had the scales fall from their eyes. By Oct. 21, 1918, 57 new cases of influenza were reported around Washington, with the Tylerdale area being hit particularly hard. Within a couple of days, the schools that had been letting children play outside had their doors locked. The clubhouse of Washington County Golf and Country Club was converted to an emergency hospital, and calls went out for nurses, doctors and bedding.
“Conditions here are serious,” The Washington Reporter forthrightly stated.
It was the same in other corners of the county. The illness traveled up the Monongahela River, with hundreds of cases being reported in Monongahela and Donora. By Oct. 25, 1918, Charleroi residents were starting to fall victim to the flu. Avella had already seen six deaths. Along with public schools, Washington Business College and Washington Female Seminary closed.
The flu eventually claimed another casualty – Halloween.
Despite the fears of contagion, the nights before the holiday saw children around Washington ringing doorbells and running away, stealing porch furniture and engaging in other forms of mischief. However, Otto Luellen, the chief of Washington’s police force, warned there “must be no promiscuous chasing about” by the community’s young people.
“There is much sickness over town, and parents are urged to be careful … to see that homes where there is sickness are not visited, or unseemly noises made about such homes,” the Reporter said. “Running on porches, slapping down sticks, pounding on windows, and other things at homes where someone may be ill would only aggravate that illness.”
By the beginning of November, the flu started to recede. Physicians were less frantic, and officials began to consider reopening schools and other gathering places. By Nov. 7, the flu was off the front page of the Reporter, replaced by joyous headlines about surrender of Germany and the end of the war. Joseph Young, a 20-year-old from Pittsburgh, survived the flu, but he was killed amid Canonsburg’s riotous celebrations when the armistice was announced. Residents exuberantly fired off their weapons, and a stray bullet ended Young’s life instantly.
A few days later, public places began to reopen, and the Globe Theater in Washington got back down to the business of offering the city’s residents some diversion. Their first features after reopening were “Deluxe Annie,” starring Norma Talmadge, and “The Spirit of ’17” with Jack Pickford. It was business as usual, with life in the city more or less back to normal.
According to Anne Madarasz, the chief historian at the Senator John Heinz History Center, the flu was “gone, almost as quickly as it came.”