In the summer of 1855, everything changed in Tidewater.
“A virus stowed away on a ship and swept into two unsuspecting cities on the southern coast of Virginia,” author Lon Wagner writes in a new nonfiction book. “What happened over the next four months has no parallel in American history.”
What happened is that virus — yellow fever — killed about a third of the entire population of Norfolk and Portsmouth.
Wagner could find no other U.S. epidemic with a death rate that came close. But he also didn’t find any major literature dedicated to explaining the history.
That’s what led him to write “The Fever: The Most Fatal Plague in American History.” It was published this week by Koehler Books in Virginia Beach.
Wagner first reported on yellow fever as a reporter at The Virginian-Pilot in 2005 through a 14-part series. He now lives in Roanoke.
WHRO caught up with Wagner to chat about what he’s learned.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WHRO: Your writing on this topic began at The Pilot two decades ago. What originally sparked your interest?
Lon Wagner: Well, as a resident of Norfolk, I lived in Colonial Place. We had had a lot of hurricanes and nor’easters in the previous years, and I heard that there was going to be a civic league meeting where somebody from the health department was coming to talk about the influx of rats we had in our neighborhood. And I went there, and there was this woman, and she hated rats and mosquitoes. I went up to her afterwards, and I said, “Why are you so determined to keep mosquitoes and rats in check?" And she said, “Well, I'm sure you've heard of the 1855 yellow fever epidemic.” And like a lot of people around here, I had heard of it, but I only knew a tiny bit about it, and so I started looking into it, and I really just couldn't believe that the epidemic happened, and happened right here where we all live.
So I went back to the office and I Googled the 1855 yellow fever epidemic, and one of the first things I came up with was the writings of this minister named George Armstrong. He had not just recorded the history, but he had written about what it was like to be on the streets in those times and the individual cases that he encountered. And I was just fascinated. He took people straight through the summer with his own observations. So I wrote a series with him primarily as the main character.
Along the way, I had set up Google alerts about mosquitoes and West Nile virus and everything. And I didn't unsubscribe to them afterwards, and they just kept coming in and coming in. I became more fascinated, not just with the story, but with the science and the biology of what had prompted this epidemic. So that's what led me to well beyond the series and into a book.
WHRO: So paint the picture of when yellow fever hit Norfolk and Portsmouth in 1855.
LW: Well a ship named the Benjamin Franklin had come in from the West Indies. All that spring yellow fever hopped from ship to ship in the harbor in St. Thomas. So this ship headed north to New York. It was bound for New York, it was bad luck that it ended up here. And along the way it began leaking so they turned into Hampton Roads, the body of water, to get the ship repaired in Portsmouth.
Everybody thought it was OK for a while, and then just after the Independence Day holiday, somebody who had been working on the hull of the ship got sick and didn't show up for work. At first they thought he partied too hard over at Old Point Comfort on July 4, but then he didn't show up for three days, and some doctors came in and they saw him, and as soon as they saw him, they recognized the signs of yellow fever. That was the thing that sort of sparked all the fear and the local residents knew, “Uh oh, this is bad. We gotta really watch out. This could be an epidemic.”
Mosquitoes were breeding on the ship on the way north, and they had also infected crew members of the ship. There were mosquitoes on shore here, obviously, as there always are. When those mosquitoes on the ship came and started biting local residents, then that injects the virus into a resident. Then when other mosquitoes bite that person, other mosquitoes get infected. So it becomes this very rapidly multiplying transmission loop.
Yellow fever destroys the body from the inside. It shuts down. It attacks the kidney and shuts down the liver, and that's when the eyes start to turn yellow and the skin turns yellow, and that's why it's called yellow fever.
It was, in my estimation, the most fatal epidemic in U.S. history, because one out of three people who remained here in town that summer died from yellow fever, which is an incredible fatality rate.
There were about 16,000 people in Norfolk and about 10,000 in Portsmouth, and it's estimated that about 75% of them fled. People didn't know much about yellow fever at the time. But they knew it came on ships, and they knew the way to avoid it was to get the heck out of town. And so anybody who had any money at all fled. A lot of the really wealthy people went to springs resorts in the western part of the state and just had a wonderful summer. So the people who were left here were poor people, Black people — either enslaved Black people or freed Black people — and the ministers and doctors who stayed behind to help. It was basically about 100 days from the time the first cases were found until October 8, when there was a hard frost and that quelled the mosquitoes for the winter, and it went away.
WHRO: How do you think this crisis shaped our region in a lasting way?
LW: Well, think about this. Bankers, the head of a railroad, city leaders, police officers, police chiefs, newspaper editors died. This was the next leadership class of these two cities. It just makes you wonder: were things sort of throttled at that time and in combination with the Civil War? Maybe these two cities could have been great, booming meccas of the East Coast, and they were sort of tampered back by this epidemic. And of course there's no way to know for real.
WHRO: Did what you know about the yellow fever epidemic influence your experience during the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago?
LW: I saw a lot of common characteristics, and a lot of those characteristics were not really about the science or medicine, but in terms of how people behave when they are really, really frightened. And I think that's what drove the 1855 epidemic, and I think that's what drove a lot of the action during the COVID pandemic.
It’s interesting because I don't think there are many medical lessons to be learned from the 1855 epidemic, because the medicine was so bad at the time. The lessons are more about how people treat each other and how to get through something like that. Everybody should best band together and help each other.
WHRO: Why do you think this history has been so overlooked until now?
LW: This wasn't just a local story. This was the story of that summer. It was first reported in the New York Times that a ship with yellow fever had landed in Portsmouth. People came from all over the country. Philadelphia was an absolutely heroic city in this; they provided more support than any other city in the country, and this was at a time when there was no president who was going to declare a national state of emergency and send the National Guard. There was no American Red Cross. This was a horrible thing, but in a way this was almost the real birth of Norfolk and Portsmouth, because they survived this. This was an existential crisis. These two cities could have pretty much ended at this time if they didn't push through this.
I think what happened is, after the epidemic, the (cities) survived the next summer and got through that. Then very soon after that, the Civil War broke out, and Norfolk was an occupied city. And the next five years just sort of swept previous history away.
I had a couple of motivations for writing this book, and one was that I have three daughters, and they had heard me talking about this darn thing for so long that I didn't want to leave it unfinished. The second was because Norfolk and Portsmouth and Hampton Roads, it seems like they're often part of somebody else's story, but not their own story. I really want people around here to know this is our story. This is something that our city survived, and it's a really big part of U.S. history.
You can find Wagner’s book on Amazon and stores including Prince Books in Norfolk.
