Yellow fever struck hard in Washington

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On Aug. 13, 1853, Oramel Hinckley, master of the steamer Opelousas, advertised that his boat would not return to Washington from New Orleans because of a yellow fever epidemic there. He said he would begin his Washington-to-New Orleans runs again when “the epidemic shall cease or the citizens say they are not afraid of her being the means of transmitting the disease.”
Yellow fever epidemics were regular visitors to south Louisiana in those days and they were deadly. Steamboat towns were particularly vulnerable because of the influx of travelers from New Orleans, where the disease regularly ran rampant. Washington had seen relatively minor outbreaks in 1837 and 1839, but this one in 1853 would be far different.
During this episode newspapers reported more than 100 people dying each day in New Orleans. In Washington, the first reaction was to deny that the disease had made its way to the town. At a public meeting on Aug. 29, a committee of businessmen reported they had “personal interviews with all of the physicians of the town,” and found that “the rumor gone abroad of the numerous cases of yellow fever and deaths in our midst is wholly untrue.”
They were wrong. By the week of September 10, according to the Opelousas Courier, yellow fever was “raging awfully” at Washington, claiming at least three people a day. On Oct. 1, the Courier reported that the news from Washington was “awful.”
The plague raged for weeks until, finally, the Courier announced on Oct. 29, “We have been visited by a heavy frost on Tuesday [Oct. 25]. … Yellow Fever is gone! gone! gone!.”
Sadly, by the time the cool weather dealt with the mosquitoes that carried the disease, fully one-third of the people of Washington had been killed by it. So many victims were buried in the old Washington graveyard that to this day it is known as the yellow fever cemetery.
In a lengthy article after the epidemic, the Courier suggested that the fever was brought to Washington by a family “who had lost some of its members in New Orleans from Yellow Fever.” When the family “arrived by the steamer Opelousas … a very practical and well known planter of this Parish then on board … observed that it would be well if their baggage be burnt or done away with.” according to the newspaper. After their arrival, the Courier said, yellow fever “grasped the whole village in its deathly embrace,” and was carried as far as 50 miles away by people fleeing from the disease.
Tragically, Yellow Jack, as the disease was popularly called, was not through with the town. There were outbreaks again in each of the next two years, 1854 and 1855, although to a lesser degree. That may have been because there were fewer potential victims. A survivor of the fever is immune for the rest of his or her life.
Unfortunately, any immunity Washington might have enjoyed disappeared by 1867, when there was an epidemic that rivaled the one of 1853. During September and October of that year more than 500 people got sick in Washington and 73 died.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.