At nature's mercy:
Vermonters prove their mettle through floods, flu and blizzards
Vermonters prove their mettle through floods, flu and blizzards
From The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, March 29, 1999
By Nancy Bazilchuk
Nothing could have prepared Frank Eastman for what happened in the fall of 1918. Then again, no one was prepared.
Eastman was a lineman with a small power company in Montpelier and Barre that would become Green Mountain Power Corp. A fastidious man, he kept a detailed, precise diary. Friday, Sept. 27, Eastman wrote that nine of his crew were sick. By the next day, 14 were out. Two weeks later, he recorded the first deaths among his men: "Carpenter Wiley died this morning and the switchboard operator this afternoon."
Eastman's men were dying from the Spanish flu, a sudden, virulent epidemic. In Vermont, 1,772 people died. Around the world, millions died -- more than were lost in World War I. It was a dreadful calamity, the most severe natural disaster to hit Vermont in the 20th century. There have been others that devastated lives and caused widespread damage in Vermont. We've come to expect them: forest fires and floods, blizzards and ice storms.
In 1903, forest fires raged through the Northeast Kingdom. In 1927, 84 were killed when floodwaters ripped out bridges and carted away homes - with families still in them. In 1938, a freak hurricane roared up the East Coast, flattening forests and crops, leaving scars that are visible in places today. Hundreds of people were killed.
All these catastrophes have tested our character, our ability to get up and continue on. Through it all, people like Frank Eastman have worked in sometimes indescribable discomfort to help people they didn't know, had never met. They did it without question, without expectation of any thanks: quiet heroes in the storm.
Each disaster brought change as well - slight, almost imperceptible in some cases, drastic in others. We owe our bridges to the flood of 1927. We owe our modern weather services to the hurricane of 1938. We are better warned, better prepared now, though we still are at nature's mercy. In 1998, an ice storm left thousands in the cold and dark; it drove many from their homes for days. Last summer, violent, heavy rains forced people in the Mad River Valley to dash from their homes near raging, swelling rivers.
Time will tell whether these storms will be the stuff of legends for the next generations. Looking back on this century, though, there are plenty already.
Deadly flu of 1918
Frank Eastman, born on a dairy farm in East Calais in 1876, described himself as a "maintenance man and general useful person." He was a handyman who understood machines at a time when everything from cars to hydropower turbines to tractors was only beginning to dominate our lives.
He was a big, powerful man with huge hands and feet and a broken nose that kept him from breathing with his mouth closed. He married twice - his first wife died of illness - but never had children. Instead, he gave his life to the electric company, stringing wires and keeping the power on.
For more than 40 years, Eastman kept his diary, making note of his life, opening a remarkable window to the changes - and calamities ? around him.
The flu was the worst. Scientists today don't know why this flu was so deadly. It killed more than 600,000 people in the United States and more than 30 million around the world. The flu disproportionately killed the young and healthy. It sometimes killed extraordinarily quickly. There are stories of healthy travelers boarding trains only to die during the day's journey. There is a story of a group of four women who played a pleasant evening's game of bridge and went to bed; only one survived the night.
Consider this description from a doctor known only as "Roy" who served at what is now Fort Devens in Massachusetts:
"These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of LaGrippe or Influenza and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have mahogany spots over the cheek bones and a few hours later ... (it spreads) all over the face?It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible."
Eastman witnessed the epidemic in Oswego, N.Y., on Lake Ontario, where he'd been sent to build a power plant. "My men began to be sick 3 or 4 at a time, at one time I was reduced to 5 men, none of whom could speak English," he wrote.
Eastman's second wife, Clara, who trained as a nurse but never completed her schooling, joined hundreds of volunteers called on to care for the afflicted. At one point Clara cared for seven families and worked 19 hours a day.
In Vermont the story was no different. Everywhere, people grew sick and many then died. Ken Bessette of Williston was 12 when the flu broke out. He was working the 6 p.m. to midnight shift at Western Union in Burlington. Back then, people didn't send telegrams unless it was bad news, and in 1918, Bessette was a busy boy.
"Everyone, it seemed, had the flu," recalled the 93-year-old Bessette in an interview at his home. "I would knock and get no answer, and I would call in and say, 'Telegram,' and they would all start to cry."
Often too weak to come to the door, they would invite Bessette in and ask him to read the dreary telegrams at their sickbeds. Western Union boys were asked to do more than bear bad news. As the casualties climbed, Bessette and his cohorts were sent to the train station to unload rough-hewn boxes carrying bodies being shipped back for burial.
Some bodies came back in expensive wicker caskets, which were in short supply. Bessette and the other boys had to unload the bodies, put them in rough boxes and then ship the caskets back to the distant undertakers who supplied them. One time, he said, "I remember it was snowing like hell and the wind was blowing the white sheets around the bodies."
In Montpelier, Phil S. Howes watched as the flu overtook residents and doctors alike. He recorded the toll in his own diary:
"Miss Helen M. Greene, one of the teachers who roomed here the last two years but this year at Fred Wilson's, died at the hospital of pneumonia resulting from the Spanish grip," he wrote Wednesday, Sept. 25. "Poor girl; it took her out in just a week."
The numbers soon began to overwhelm Howes."The epidemic ... is very serious as there is probably 300 cases with a great shortage of nurses and doctors," he wrote Sept. 27. "There is no one to care for the sick and in some cases whole families are stricken at once and many cases are developed into pneumonia and proved fatal."
He and his wife volunteered to help at the local hospital Sunday, Sept. 29."We came down from the hospital at 7:30, and they are surely in need of help," Howes wrote the next day. "Every nurse from the matron down is sick. ... The conditions are pitiful not only there but about town and other places. It is a terrible epidemic."
Montpelier officials asked Howes to help keep track of the sickness. A partial count Oct. 2 showed 1,237 residents severely sick in bed and another 1,876 recovering.
"Dr. Turner of Worcester was brought in today with a bad case of pneumonia and it don't look as though he has a chance," said Howes' Oct. 5 entry. "He is the only doctor there and kept going long after he should have been in bed." Turner died the next day.
In spite of their contact with the sick, neither Eastman nor his wife became ill, nor did Howes or Bessette. Neither did Bessette's father, who used to gargle nightly with kerosene to protect himself.
Eastman marveled at his luck. "Every man except myself and one old tough Italian had it sooner or later," he wrote. "Why we didn't I never knew."
Hardest hit was Washington County, where 437 people died, mostly in Barre and Montpelier. Barre residents were more susceptible because of their work - immigrant laborers toiled long and hard in the granite quarries and their lungs were irritated by the dust. In Montpelier, state workers came in contact with people from all over the state who brought the flu with them. In Chittenden County, 265 people died. Statewide, the death toll was 1,772. No other illness has claimed so many Vermonters' lives in such a short time.
Fear of the illness was palpable. Towns issued bans on public gatherings, closing movie houses, clubs, churches, lodges and even schools. Even funerals were regulated: Only immediate family members were allowed at the burial site, and church services were limited or prohibited.
Then, just like that, the flu was gone. By Nov. 11, when Germany signed an armistice ending World War I, news of the flu fell off the front pages of the nation's newspapers and into memory.
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