Spanish flu impacts in Logan County still felt 100 years later

 

[April 19, 2019] 

LINCOLN 

Bill Donath’s presentation Monday evening at the monthly meeting of the Logan County Genealogical and Historical Society was about one of the most horrifying events of the early twentieth century. No, it was not World War I.

The Spanish flu epidemic that appeared at the close of the Great War took more lives than the war itself, perhaps as many as ten times the causalities of the war.

Bill is currently doing research on the Spanish flu epidemic and its effects on Lincoln and Logan County. His previous research includes the Civil War and World War I with a similar focus on what they meant to Lincoln and Logan County.

The Spanish flu was a worldwide epidemic that left no part of the globe untouched. It arrived in Logan County on a specific date, October 5, 1918. We know this because of the records from Logan County that Donath researched. There it is, the first record of the flu in Logan County followed by forty pages of nothing but illnesses and deaths from the flu.

To say it ravaged Logan County is an understatement.

While the flu itself was a serious and debilitating illness, the secondary infections that people got because of their weakened immune systems tended to be the ones that resulted in death. It is sort of a perfect storm of an epidemic that the 1918 Spanish flu was so bad. “Pneumonia had been increasing in the world in the years before the flu,” said Donath. It turned out to be the main secondary illness that leads to the majority of deaths.

Because of the war, large groups of people were forced to congregate in military camps, and the flu had an easy population to infect. The spread was rapid. Between the first record of a flu case on October 5, 1918, and the end of the year, two-thousand cases occurred in Logan County resulting in one-hundred deaths. It was extremely contagious.

“In Lincoln and Logan County, some of the trends of the flu were especially tragic,” said Bill Donath. Young women who had just given birth were especially vulnerable. Doctors and nurses were not immune. In 1918, doctors were called away from Logan County to treat the troops in military camps around the state, leaving their patients at home with no medical care.

Whole families were taken ill. One Mount Pulaski family of twelve with two parents and ten children, were all infected. Both parents died. St. Clara’s and Deaconess, the two hospitals in Lincoln at the time were full with flu victims. Records show that deaths occurred in homes, but the rest of the family was too sick to remove the bodies. The horror was everywhere.

The flu was a painful and debilitating illness. It usually took two weeks of hell before a person succumbed to the illness or secondary pneumonia. There was no treatment at the time for either. It was said that death was an angel given the horrendous toll the illness took on a person. Folk remedies were tried to no avail. Whiskey and leaving a person outdoors during the illness were two common treatments. People were desperate.

“Schools were closed numerous times in Logan County to try to stem the spread,” said Bill Donath. When cases subsided, school was started again only to see the shadow of the flu reoccur as the close confines of a one room schoolhouse brought children together to pass on the virus to each other and their families at home.

“One offshoot of the illness and burgeoning death toll was the effect on the Lincoln Casket Factory. It was operating twenty-four, seven,” said Donath.

The Spanish flu epidemic even has an effect on present time. Bill Donath researched the death records of Logan County extensively. “Sometimes I had to get up from my research and walk away. It gave me an odd feeling, and was very disturbing going over these records,” he said.

And then, as quickly as it appeared in October of 1918, it was gone in 1920. Theories abound about its origin, none with any hard facts. Today, flu vaccines are available before the start of flu season for everyone to forestall an epidemic. Modern science has created a barrier to the flu and other contagious illnesses. We just have to use it.

The Logan County Genealogical and Historical Society meets on the third Monday of the month at their research facility on Chicago Street in Lincoln at 6:30 p.m. They always have an interesting speaker and the public is invited to attend.

001 Logan County historical researcher/speaker Bill Donath.


007 One of the tragic stories about a family devastated by the Spanish flu epidemic that struck 1918 to 1920. This young mother was typical of the new moms who were unusually susceptible to the flu.


008 Doctors and nurses were not immune to the ravages of the Spanish flu.


009 A poster encouraging correct behavior to prevent the spread of the flu.

010 One way to prevent the spread of the flu was to quarantine a family. Imagine the feeling of being imprisoned in your home with a silent killer. In some cases it was documented that people died in the home, but were not removed for burial because family members were too sick to help.


011 A poster calling the public to help the war effort by preventing the spread of the flu. It was said that ten people died of the flu for every soldier who died during combat in World War I.

[Curtis Fox]