By Colleen Nelson
It seems like Groundhog Day ever since the world we know stopped the clock in mid-March and put words like social distancing, masks, and essential workers into our everyday vocabulary. I find myself catching glimpses of Bill Murray grinning at me from the corner of my mind as one day melds with the next and I learn, to my surprise that I’m getting better at the things I now have time to do, things I’ve been putting off. I look at the pie coming out of the oven with a perfect crust and grin back at Bill. Why have I waited so long to have this much fun?
Day by day the seasons are changing, incrementally, wonderfully. Wildflowers bloom, the trees leaf out, and birds build nests and strut their stuff. I find myself staying close to home, caught up in the natural order of things, the day-to-day business of taking care of farm and family, shopping for neighbors, chasing spring beauty on back roads, turning on the computer to go to church, and writing down those things that make me – and you, I’m betting! – love this place.
While science searches for a magic bullet for COVID-19, I hunker down and search through the local history that Dr. G. Wayne Smith was able to pull from newspaper microfilm. I’m looking for the DNA of epidemics that have visited Greene County in the past, looking for clues that might give some perspective to what we are living through today. These days we know Dylan was right – it’s blowing in the wind, carried by human movement, carried home on ships from the trenches of World War I and now on the wings of jets worldwide. As I look through Dr. Smith’s big blue books, l find yet another, earlier batch of microscopic capriciousness that came calling in the late 1880s. Greene County was by then connected to the outside world by railroad, gas and oil speculators were arriving in droves, and towns were getting big enough to overflow what little pioneer infrastructure they might have had in place. Waterborne typhoid was first to arrive in the summer of 1888, a presidential election year. Campaigning was at a fever pitch – congressional hopeful Joseph W. Ray was accused of being an “infidel, a follower of Ingersol and a foe of the working man” but he won anyway. Still, with more than 100 cases of typhoid fever in a three-week period that August, people were afraid to come to Waynesburg, college enrollment was down and Waynesburg’s 21st annual agricultural exhibition was canceled. By September, the board decided to hold the fair but attendance was sparse. By the early winter months of 1889, Greene County and the rest of the country were experiencing an epidemic of “le grippe” – influenza. There were few deaths but school attendance was down dramatically as students and teachers sickened. Another round of influenza, along with measles, swept the county the next winter – Dr. Ullum of Waynesburg caught the flu and the Greene Academy closed for the month of February. According to The Waynesburg Republican “mud, la grippe and measles were holding fort,” Dr. Miller in Bristoria was riding night and day to treat his patients, and Judge Inghram was “so ill with la grippe that he could not open the April term of court.”
By 1892 the overworked doctors of Greene County were able to catch their breath and host the Tri-County Medical Society at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Waynesburg. At the banquet later that evening at the Downey House, they saluted their profession with toasts “some of which were entitled ‘Physician as a Citizen,’ ‘The Rich Patient,’ ‘The Poor Patient,’ ‘The Hysterical Patient,’ ‘Quackeries’ and ‘The Physician as a Domestic Animal.’”
Residents would not know such fear again until 1916 brought the threat of poliomyelitis to Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Statewide quarantines were ordered and kids under age 16 were banned from public gatherings, including fairs, movie theaters, Sunday schools, and church services. School openings were delayed – Waynesburg High School did not open until October 2. Luckily, only one case of polio was reported in Greene County, which caused Dr. Iams, the county’s medical inspector, to go into snark mode and call the scare “poliophobia…that had caused a near paralysis to many people.”
Two years later, Greene County was hit with a double whammy when the boys of Company K helped push the Germans back “some six miles along a twenty-five- mile front” between Soissons and Chateau-Thierry in mid-July 1918. Joy turned to sorrow on August 15 when the telegrams from the War Department arrived announcing the death of 15 soldiers who died on July 28-29 and the wounding of many others in that campaign. As news of the dead, wounded and missing continued to trickle in that fall, the war was winding down but a world pandemic was on its way. “Termed the Spanish influenza it spread like a cyclone from the Western Front in Europe and claimed about 500,000 victims in the United States alone, including thousands of soldiers in army camps.” By October 10 there were more than 40 cases in Waynesburg alone; all churches, theaters and moving picture houses were closed. Schools were soon to follow and children were ordered to shelter at home. Waynesburg Hospital in the Blair Building on East High Street was filled to overflowing and an emergency hospital with 30 cots was opened in the Ross Building on Morris Street with three nurses and 15 Red Cross volunteers tending to the sick and dying. Schools reopened after three weeks and the Armistice was signed to end the war on November 11, but the epidemic continued throughout the winter. By April 1919 “there were flu patients in almost every house in Wind Ridge and seven in one house alone.” All told, 55 Greene countians of all ages died.
When Mr. and Mrs. Holder died within days of each other that April, leaving two daughters age eight and two months, their obituary was a tribute to grief: “Not in this generation, during a single year, has such a heavy weight of sorrow and bereavement been felt by the people Greene County as they have been called upon to bear during the past twelve months…”
Suited up with mask and gloves, I head to town, ready to nod to old friends at the super market, drop off a bundle of ramps as a spring gift at my favorite eatery, now take out only. I’ve been out and about doing the little essentials volunteers are needed for, making signs for the monthly food pantry reminding folks to stay in their vehicles, and talking to teachers and neighbor kids about how these last two months have been going.
Surprisingly well, it turns out.
Kids have been doing their schoolwork in their pajamas and loving it but dearly missing their friends. Some have gone hunting after lessons are done, some have written letters to friends describing what being caught up in a pandemic is like to them. Trout fishing has given whole families a chance to get outside to enjoy the spring weather. Taking wildflower walks and lazy cruises on country roads has been just another way to remind us to find beauty in this new normal.
Now that moving into the yellow zone is here, the folks of Greene and surrounding counties are poised to be part of a great experiment that no one knows the answer to – what happens next?
I’m betting the folks of Westsylvania – what the first settlers tried to name this isolated corner of the Western Frontier – have learned where the danger lies and are ready to do whatever it takes to keep it at bay – by keeping ourselves, our families and our community as safe as we can. If history has any lesson to teach it’s that epidemics are the ferocious enemies that give no quarter. We’re all in this together.