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Stephen Mather: Secret Breakdown at the Dawn of the National Park Service

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Stephen Mather went to the wilderness to heal the brainsickness that plagued him throughout his life. Ironically, his work to save America’s wilderness sent him into a depression that took him two years to pull out of.

Stephen Mather

Mather had a head full of ideas and enormous energy. He was brilliant, athletic, charming, generous and impulsive. From time to time he suffered what people then called a nervous breakdown, now called bipolar disorder. He broke down soon after the National Park Service came into existence in 1916. President Woodrow Wilson then appointed him director of the National Park Service.

But Mather’s loyal 27-year-old assistant, Horace Albright, secretly did the job for him for two years. That Mather served as the first National Park Service director in anything but name only is a fiction the park service keeps up to this day.

Horace Albright

Stephen Mather

Mather was born July 4, 1867, in San Francisco, but considered Connecticut home. He was part of an old, well-known New England family: the Mathers. A distant relative of Increase and Cotton Mather (as well as John Cotton), he eventually inherited a farmhouse in Darien that his great-grandfather, Deacon Joseph Moses Mather, built in 1778. His family spent summers there.

Stephen Tyng Mather home in Darien

Mather graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 1887. He then worked for the New York Sun for five years, but moved to Chicago as sales manager for the Pacific Coast Borax Company. There he came up with the “20 Mule Team Borax” brand, still in use.

In 1903, Stephen Mather collapsed from overwork and stress. He took a vacation in the South for five weeks, which seemed to help. But every time he returned to work, his malaise and depression returned. He spent four months at a Wisconsin sanitarium, then a few more months at the seashore. It didn’t work. Finally his doctor told him to give up all work, and he took an eight-month trip to Europe. When he returned to his old job, he discovered the company had fired him.

He went off and started his own borax company with a partner in Chicago. They made a huge success of it and made a million dollars – a lot of money back then. Occasionally he showed signs of his old trouble, but he cured himself by going to the western wilderness – in 1906, 1912 and 1914.

The Dynamic Duo

During that long trip to Europe, Stephen Mather renewed his interest in nature and the outdoors. He returned to the U.S. a dedicated conservationist. Mather joined the Sierra Club, met John Muir, climbed Mount Rainier. He made enough money in the borax business to retire in 1914 and pursue his interest in conservation.

At the summit of Mount Rainier, 1888. Left to right: D.W. Bass, P. B. Van Trump, John Muir, N.O. Booth, Edward Sturgis Ingraham.

An apocryphal story has Stephen Mather writing a letter to Interior Secretary Franklin Lane. In it he complained about the exploitation of the national parks and the theft of parkland. Lane replied, “Dear Steve, If you don’t like the way the parks are being run, come on down to Washington and run them yourself.”

It never happened. Rather, a mutual friend of Lane and Mather suggested they meet in Chicago. They did, and Lane offered Mather the job of assistant secretary of the Interior.

Mather doubted he could do it. “This is all so very new to me. I have never been under restrictions or a lot of regulations. I’m just not temperamentally fitted for this type of work in Washington. I’ll probably get in trouble before the job is an hour old.”

Lane said he’d give him Horace Albright — “a young fellow who knows the ropes and who’ll handle the legal and other troubles you’ll run into. He’s the man to keep you out of trouble, someone who knows the department, can handle the routine.”

They’re So Different

Mather said he’d take the job if Albright served as his assistant. Albright, also a UC-Berkeley graduate, felt an instant affinity for Mather and agreed. Mather sweetened the deal by supplementing Albright’s salary out of his own pocket.

As an old man, Albright recalled how he and Mather melded into an indivisible unit. They complemented each other beautifully. As Albright later wrote, “These fellas remind me of each other — they’re so different.”

Albright grew up poor in California and worked his way through college. He had a part-time job with economist Adolph Miller, who then accepted a position in Washington as assistant secretary of the Interior Department. Miller brought Albright with him. He soon moved on as one of the first governors of the Federal Reserve, but Albright stayed at Interior.

‘I’ll Buy It Myself’

Interior Secretary Franklin Lane wanted Stephen Mather to work on establishing an independent park service bureau. At the time, the national parks were a loose collection of properties run by the army or political hacks.

The parks suffered from neglect within the government, with no advocate within the administration, no budget, no rangers. The hotels, restaurants and sanitary facilities in the parks were abysmal, and the parks themselves were bedraggled and inaccessible to most people.

Yosemite National Park

Mather passionately wanted to create a National Park Service despite his reluctance to take a government job. Full of plans and ideas, he spent his own fortune to make his dream come true. He didn’t take a salary, and he hired a full-time publicist out of his own pocket. He spent thousands of his own dollars to buy the Tioga Road, which made Yosemite more accessible to the public. Once, in Glacier National Park, Mather got angry when he discovered the park headquarters were located three miles down a nearly impassable road from the railroad station.

The supervisor said all the land between the station and headquarters was owned privately. Mather said, “Well, if that’s the only problem, I’ll buy it myself.”

Glacier National Park

Stephen Mather Saves the Sequoias

Mather worked zealously to promote and preserve his parks. In 1915, the government created Sequoia National Park. Mather learned a large portion of the Giant Forest, containing the best of the giant sequoias, remained in private hands. The owners planned to build a summer resort.

Mather then held a two-week mountain party to with influential congressmen, wealthy businessmen and publishers.

Mr. Mather invited a number of wealthy Easterners to camp with him in the grove, explained the situation, and was

They rode mules and camped with comfort in the High Sierras. The mountain party promised enough money to buy the lands for the government.

Gilbert Grosvener, president of the National Geographic Society, came along. For the next century National Geographic magazine staunchly promoted the national parks.

NPS Employees, Directors The Mather Mountain Party of 1915 Mather seated at head of table (left). Albright in front of cook (Ty Sing). Image was redistributed by National Geographic.

Camping in Comfort

Mather brought along an accomplished cook, Ty Sing. He believed the parks would only attract tourists if they offered good food and comfortable accommodations, and Ty Sing drove home the point. The mountain party, for example, enjoyed a white-tablecloth banquet under the redwoods in the Giant Forest.

At the end of the party, Mather spoke to the group:

To each of you, to all of you, remember that God has given us these beautiful lands. Try to save them for, and share them with, future generations. Go out and spread the gospel!

Sunset at Mather Point, Grand Canyon

Mather believed in the power of publicity to realize his dream. He wanted to create a grassroots system of support for the parks, and Congress would respond to public pressure to create and fund the National Park Service.

His publicist, Robert Yard, poured out articles and pamphlets about the parks’ breathtaking scenery. He extolled the beautiful alpine lakes of Glacier; the unbelievable blue of Crater Lake; Yellowstone’s wonderland of geysers, mountains and rivers on top of a supervolcano. The Grand Canyon wasn’t a national park yet, but Yard promoted it as well.

Geyser at Yellowstone National Park

Breakdown

On Aug. 25, 1916, President Wilson signed the bill creating the national park service into law. Shortly afterward, Albright noticed Stephen Mather began to act erratically. His moods suddenly changed. In one meeting, he poured forth wildly extravagant ideas. He ordered Albright to drop everything in Washington and meet him in Chicago. When Albright arrived, Mather asked him, “What are you doing in Chicago?”

Then, during a national conference on the park service that lasted several days, Mather went missing times. He was supposed to be running the conference. Finally, a few days afterward, Mather had dinner with friends at the Cosmos Club in Washington. He began to talk about his failures, threatened to leave the park service and then grew silent. His friends continued to talk, trying to cheer him up. But suddenly he put his head down on the table and began crying.

The Cosmos Club today

Albright got a call at 10:00 p.m. A friend of Mather’s, E.O. McCormick, was at the Cosmos Club, where Mather stayed while in Washington, D.C.

Albright wasn’t prepared for what he saw at the club.

His friends had taken Mather into a small reception room and closed the door against curious onlookers. Though loosely held by McCormick, he was rocking back and forth, alternately crying, moaning, and hoarsely trying to get something said. I couldn’t understand a thing. He was incoherent. His movements became more agitated while his voice rose. I feared he might hurt himself. As I was younger and stronger, I replace McCormick, holding him with both arms. Several us talked quietly to him, trying to soothe his wild mood, but to no avail. Suddenly he broke out of my hold, rushed for the door, and with an anguished cry, proclaimed he couldn’t live any longer feeling as he did.

They grabbed hold of him again, hustled him into a room and called for a doctor, who administered a sedative. Albright then called Jane Mather, his wife, who told him to take him to Dr. T.H. Weisenberg in Philadelphia.

The 1915 dedication of Rocky Mountain National Park; (l to r): Stephen Mather, Robert Yard, acting superintendent Trowbridge, NPS photographer Herford T. Cowling and Horace M. Albright.

Recovery

Interior Secretary Lane told Albright to keep Mather’s illness quiet. He appointed Albright as acting director of the National Park Service, a placeholder until Mather could return. If he returned.

In 1917, treatment for mental illness involved isolation from the outside world, exercise, a healthy diet and exercise. No excitement, no problems. Mather’s doctor planned to slowly introduce him to the only thing that seemed to interest him, the national parks.

After two months, Albright went to see him – his first visitor. Mather was staying in a sunny Pennsylvania sanitarium. His room had only two pictures on the wall, of Yosemite National Park. Someone had removed the glass from the frames so Mather wouldn’t try suicide with it.  Albright found him better, but still fragile.

Back in Washington, Albright laid the foundation for the National Park Service. He hired qualified personnel and set policy on grazing  and digging for artifacts. Albright also worked to enlarge the parks and add new ones, including Zion, Grand Canyon and Acadia. He organized the park rangers and had uniforms designed for them. He made campground rules. All the while, Albright worked to keep commercial interests out of the parks.

United States – California – Sequoia National Park

Reappearance

Mather suddenly reappeared in Washington in November 1917, nearly a year after his breakdown. He announced he’d resume his old duties as National Parks director. His staff went along with him — sort of. They screened his calls, his mail, his visitors.

The doctor told Albright to let him play at being director. “Keep all the problems away from him while you do all the work,” the doctor ordered.

Fortunately, Mather got interested in saving the redwoods and stayed out west. Then in 1918 Mather inspected Mount Rainier. He spent the summer of 1918 in California, far away from the stress of Washington.

Zion Canyon at sunset in Zion National Park as seen from Angels Landing looking south.

Frenzy

Mather came back to Washington in January 1918. Albright had then taken a vacation to visit family in California when he got a telegram from the Interior Secretary. “You must return at once,” wrote Lane. “Matters here make it imperative.”

When Albright reached Washington, Lane told him Mather had gone into a check-writing frenzy.

“I’ve got a wild man on my hands,” Lane said. “You’re the only one who can handle him. Get him out of Washington.” Albright found Mather in a state of frenzied euphoria and extreme aggression.

Mather’s wife, back in Chicago, told Albright he’d been writing checks to political campaigns for thousands of dollars. Albright suggested they leave for Chicago so they could make plans in the heartland.

Mather agreed. Albright took him back to Chicago by train that night — a harrowing journey as Mather had produced a handful of razors from his luggage. Albright spent the night sharpening the razors at Mather’s direction. But they arrived safely in Chicago.

Mather didn’t come back to Washington for months. Friends and doctors found distractions for the troubled parks director.

Afterward

By 1919, Mather had recovered enough to go back to his job as National Parks director. Albright, exhausted from overwork and with a wife and new baby in California, resigned as assistant. He took a job as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park.

Horace Albright with a friend in Yellowstone

Mather continued as park director for a decade, calling on Albright to troubleshoot from time to time. He resigned in 1929 due to his health. and Horace Albright returned to Washington as the second National Park Service director.

With thanks to Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years by Horace M. Albright and Marian Albright Schenck.

Images: Yellowstone National Park Ken Lunnd via Flickr, CC by-SA 2.0; Yosemite by Koshy Koshy via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Mount Rainier By Walter Siegmund (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6218147. Mount Rainier By Walter Siegmund (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6218147. Sequoia By World Wide Gifts – Flickr: United States – California – Sequoia National Park, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27956333. Zion CanyonBy Diliff – taken by Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=305224. Grand Canyon by Grand Canyon National Park via Flickr, .CC By 2.0.

This story was updated in 2024.

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Terrified and Stranded in the Hurricane of 1938

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Our reader Colleen LeBoeuf sent us a marvelous letter written by her grandmother describing how her family was stranded in the hurricane of 1938 in Barrington, R.I. LeBoeuf’s grandmother, Eleanor Deans, escaped drowning in the floodwaters when her father put her and other children in a rowboat.

Known as the Great New England Hurricane, it ranked as one of the four worst storms in the region’s written history. As many as 800 people died in the storm, which struck Long Island and all of New England on September 21, 1938. It wiped away entire communities, altered the shoreline of Long Island, washed away bridges, severed train lines and took down 20,000 utility wires. The mess took years to clean up.

The damage to Barrington permanently altered the seaside town. The town’s character changed from summer hot spot to residential suburb after the storm washed away beachfront tent cities, cottages, hotels and boarding houses.

Location of Ferry Lane in relation to the water. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Stranded in the Hurricane of 1938

Here is the letter, typewritten, on three pages. (We made minor changes for readability.) Marguerite Deans wrote it to her friend, Esther.

Ferry Lane
Barrington, R.I.
Sept. 30, 1938

Dearest Esther,

Received your card this afternoon. Yes, we are all safe, I believe.  We all had quite an exciting time and for a while I thought you would never see any of us again. If you don’t mind I will try to give you an idea of what we went through.

Of course as you know the wind was high all day, but about three o’clock the wind began to increase and soon after that the big tree around here began loosing its branches. The water began to rise, trees blew down and [at] about four forty-five the trees, the big ones, began loosening at the base and a couple began to fall right across the road – just as Bill drove his car around the corner, with water up to the hubs – the motor stalled – and the big trees crashed to the ground right in front of the machine. Boy, oh Boy. He got out and waded in water then up to his knees to get into the house.

Copy of the letter about getting stranded in the hurricane of 1938 by Marguerite Deans.

Whirlpool

Well, from then on things began to go from bad to worse. The lady across the street and her little boy came over – by that time the water was knee deep right in front of the steps.

A row-boat floated up to the door from out of no-where. Bill grabbed it and the lady downstairs, the boy across the street, Billy boy, Eleanor, and the two little girls down stairs got in the boat and Bill started to push it up the street – the water then was past his waist and the water was like a whirlpool, honestly. He told the rest of us to try to follow on foot.

In Barrington, the terrible tide left yachts sitting on the streets.

Well, I stepped off the steps and the terrible tide took my feet from me and I went down. Catherine pulled me up, but I pulled her in. Somehow we got back on the steps and I looked up just in time to see Bill going down. Then the lady downstairs jumped right out of the boat and helped him to get his feet and together they pushed that boat full of children up the street where the water was not so deep.

Bill started back for the rest of us, but he beckoned to me that he could not make it and for me to go upstairs. I saw him go down again and we all, that is the rest of us, turned and ran upstairs and there we stayed, praying to be safe it it was right.

Stranded in the Hurricane of 1938

The old lady who lived in the house next to me saw her house go right off its foundations and land on our lawn with her husband (67) in it. In a few minutes he waved to us from the window where he was perched. With us was the old lady, another old lady across the street and Catherine. She would not go with the other children for she would not leave me. We just watched the waves, and believe me they were waves as big as any I ever saw at Horseneck Beach, as far as we could see in all directions.

Waves at Horseneck Beach

In a few minutes that house where the man was, separated and he jumped on a fallen tree. It soon got dark and we just walked from room to room. At five minutes to seven it was high tide and it was simply horrible. Wind rain and waves. The house just swayed. In the meantime, we saw three houses washed away, two barns, two sheds, two garages, mail boxes, fences, trees, cats on rafts, furniture and I don’t know what not. We looked down the back stairs and the water was on the third step coming up stairs.

Just Waiting

Well, after seven the wind and the tide receded a little. I got up courage then to light a kerosene lamp and the oil burner. I made some toast and cocoa for all of us. After Catherine and I changed into some dry clothes. Then we waited for we didn’t know what. About eight o’clock we heard someone coming up the stairs and it proved to be the old gentleman. He had hanged on that tree for nearly three hours. I got dry clothes for him and gave him a hot drink. Then about eight thirty Bill and the other lady’s husband came in dressed in someone else’s clothes. Gee, I was glad to see Bill for I thought I had lost him.

I was afraid to ask about all the children. But he said that they and the lady down-stairs was all safe in another house up the street.

The men then took flashlights and went out to look at the foundations of this house. One corner under the kitchen was gone and one side of the house as far as the first ceiling was ripped away. They said as long as the water didn’t rise again it would hold.

Well we all stayed in here for the rest of the night. It was an awful experience for Catherine, poor kid, she’ll never forget it.

When the Wind Whistles

In the morning the sun was shining on a terrible sight. Great big trees way up Ferry Lane – down like dominoes in a row, bots in yards, etc. Well, we were all mighty thankful just to be alive. No deaths in this section, as far as we know.

Towards night we began to get frighten[ed] again as the wind sprung up. I walked up to the Police Station and asked for a place for all of us to stay for the night. The Red Cross took us to the Bay Spring Fire Station and we all bunked on army cots. The next day my sister in Warren came and took all of my family to her home. The other two ladies and the family downstairs came to my tenement. The tenement downstairs is a perfect mess.

Tuesday we came back here and since then the family downstairs have been living with us. The other couple are living with another family near here.

I don’t mind telling you I feel timid every time the wind whistles. We still have no electric light, gas or drinking water. But I thank God we have been spared so far. My home is OK too. I don’t believe we ever will get over it. The youngsters today had the second typhoid inoculation. They are very restless tonight.

The Next Day

Saturday noon.

I asked the family with us to try to find another place to stay. I am getting pretty tired. No one else around here will take them in so I am in hopes she will go to her sisters in Pawtucket tonight. Hope God will forgive me if I am selfish.

Well, write to me and tell me your experience. I too have been wondering about your family and you. Was mighty glad to hear from you. Let me hear again.

Hastily but lovingly, Marguerite

The Deans family. Catherine (Kaye), Billy, Jr., Bill, Eleanor. Marguerite Deans at the top. Courtesy Colleen LeBoeuf.

Stranded in the Hurricane of 1938: Postscript

LeBoeuf added a postscript to the story of her grandmother, Marguerite Deans, getting stranded in the hurricane of 1938.

“My mother [Eleanor] distinctly remembers all the kids being given a shot of whiskey when they reached higher ground to warm them up and settle their nerves from what they had just gone through. She further recalls her father going down and a woman with them jumping into the water to keep him from drowning.”

***

Read more about the Hurricane of 1938 in “New England Weather.” Just published by The New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy today.Images: Waves at Horseneck Beach By No machine-readable author provided. GregRM assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=822888.
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Polio Makes Its U.S. Debut in Vermont’s Otter Creek Valley in 1894

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In June of 1894, a strange nervous disease attacked several children in Vermont’s Otter Creek Valley. It started as a summer cold, but then it paralyzed its unlucky victims. After a few weeks, people in the valley began hearing about deaths from the mysterious ailment. By the end of July, the valley filled with dread as the disease took victim after victim, seemingly at random. Then finally a 37-year-old country doctor figured out what afflicted Otter Creek Valley: polio

Charles Caverly was the right person in the right place at the right time to diagnose the disease that would maim and kill tens of thousands of U.S. children over the next half century.

 

Otter Creek

Summer after summer, polio returned in great waves, striking first in the Northeast and then moving westward. It struck randomly – in the city, in the country, among rich and poor, healthy and sickly.  Like AIDS in the second half of the 20th century, polio in the first half was lethal, incurable and favored a specific group of victims – children.

It would take six decades before Jonas Salk developed the first safe vaccine against polio. But the process of eradicating the disease began with Charles Caverly and the large body of data he collected in Vermont.

Charles Caverly

He was born in Troy, N.H., on Sept. 30, 1856, to an old New England family. His great-great-grandfather, Philip Caverly, served as a soldier in the American Revolution.

He went to local high schools, prepped for college at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, N.H., and graduated from Dartmouth in 1878. He then attended the University of Vermont School of Medicine, and then studied for 18 months at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

Charles Caverly

Caverly began practice in Rutland in 1883, in association with Dr. Middleton Goldsmith.

“He was a quiet, cultivated man, with a singleness of purpose which was striking, a lack of pretense which was always charming, and an ability which was perfectly evident,” wrote Robert W. Lovett, who knew him.

But Caverly was more than a country doctor. He had a passion for public health, and by 1897 he served as president of the Vermont State Board of Health. He also taught hygiene and preventive medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.

Polio Strikes the Otter Creek Valley

The first polio cases appeared in the middle of June in Rutland and nearby Wallingford. Until mid-July, it prevailed in Rutland, then other nearby towns began reporting cases.

Caverly sensed the new disease had created a feeling of uneasiness among Vermonters. In late July he decided to investigate the outbreak systematically. He reached out to all the physicians in the area who had patients affected by the disease. Caverly identified 123 cases from June 17 to September 1. All but six were within the Otter Creek Valley, which was only 15 miles wide and 30 miles long.

The investigation, he wrote, “soon convinced me that this region had been affected by an epidemic of nervous disease very rarely observed.”

Some Polio Cases

Caverly then described some of the cases he’d seen.

The first case was a three-year-old American boy, healthy, active and strong. He grew feverish and cranky and had stomachache. After three days he lost the use of his legs. At the end of 10 days, he began to walk by holding on to chairs. Then in three weeks, he could walk again.

The second case was similar: A sturdy, 3-1/2-year-old Irish boy had a high fever and incontinence. On the third day, his legs were paralyzed. One leg improved, the other not so much, and after 10 weeks he could walk, but had spinal curvature.

Case 93, a two-year-old American boy, got stomachache, fever and rash. After a few days, his legs were paralyzed. He didn’t improve much after two months, Caverly reported.

Case four was a six-year-old boy taken with convulsions while playing in the street. They lasted nine hours, along with a fever, vomiting and excessive sensitivity of his extremities. The boy died after six days.

Polio died out in September, but not after 132 people, mostly children, had come down with it, and 18 had died.

Caverly Figures It Out

Caverly took careful note of the strange disease. Boys, for example, were more likely to get it than girls. Some died early, some recovered with no paralysis and some were permanently disabled. He saw a 70-year-old man with polio. He saw it in horses, dogs and chickens.

Caverly decided the mysterious disease had to be one of two things: cerebro-spinal meningitis or poliomyelitis. He sent the brain and spinal cord of a chicken to doctors in New York. One said it was cerebro-spinal meningitis, but two others said it was polio. Polio it was.

History of Polio

Polio was not unknown before it ravaged Otter Creek Valley. Sir Walter Scott, born in 1771, contracted it as a child and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Sir Walter Scott. Note the cane.

In 1789, British doctor Michael Underwood came up with the first clinical description of polio. He noted “the debilitations of the lower limbs” in children. Doctors called it “teething paralysis” or “infantile paralysis.” They would occasionally see isolated cases.

But because polio didn’t reach epidemic proportions, doctors, including Charles Caverly, didn’t think it contagious.

Polio, actually, is extremely contagious. A virus, it enters the body through the digestive system by droplets from the nose and mouth and by contact with contaminated feces. But the overwhelming majority of people who get it – 98 percent – don’t show symptoms.

Ironically, polio emerged at a time when advances in public health had gotten diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and diphtheria under control. Many scientists believed improvements in cleanliness and hygiene had succeeded too well. In dirtier times, they thought, infants developed mild infections but fought them off with the help of maternal antibodies. That immunized them against more severe attacks of the disease. But improved sanitation delayed children’s exposure to it, leaving them more vulnerable to the severest form of polio.

Polio Returns Every Summer

After Otter Creek, polio appeared in Europe. In the Northeast United States, it began to return every summer, at first sporadically and then with a vengeance. By 1905, the medical community realized the contagiousness of the disease. Public health authorities closed swimming pools, canceled county fairs and tacked quarantine signs on homes where the disease had struck.

In the summer of 1910, a severe epidemic of polio hit North America, killing 2,500. It hit Massachusetts hard, especially in Springfield. Another terrible outbreak struck Vermont in 1914, concentrated in the northern half of the state. The mortality rate neared 25 percent, and 226 victims were left with varying degrees of paralysis.  The state Board of Health realized it had to do something. Charles Caverly persuaded an anonymous benefactor to make a generous donation for the prevention and care of polio.

Children at a polio clinic in France. Courtesy NARA.

The state decided to hold free public clinics in the infected areas where victims could go for treatment and care.

Robert Lovett, a doctor engaged in that effort, described how patients were given braces and crutches. Therapists helped train their muscles, exercised their withered limbs and gave them massages. Family members were taught how to massage and exercise polio victims.

“Thus it happened that from being the first state in which the disease occurred in epidemic form, Vermont also became the first to undertake on a statewide scale the after-care of the victims of infantile paralysis,” wrote Lovett.

The 1916 Outbreak

The worst was yet to come. In 1916, a wave of polio struck without warning a Brooklyn neighborhood called Pigtown. Twenty-four hundred people died in New York City, 80 percent of them children under five years old.

Courtesy March of Dimes

As the terrifying disease traveled beyond New York, cities and towns in the Northeast began to bar outsiders. Armed policemen patrolled train stations and roads to make sure no strangers crossed the borders. Parents told their children not to play with anyone they didn’t know, share their ice cream cone or go swimming. In New York, people blamed dogs and cats for spreading polio. They killed 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs.

In Vermont, Charles Caverly continued to monitor the polio outbreaks. He wrote reports loaded with data about polio outbreaks in his state. They included the distribution and timing of cases, ages of victims, type of house they lived in, the soil around the house, quality of the sewer facilities, water supply, family history, the number of cases in railroad towns.

But then in 1918 polio took a back seat to another disease – influenza. Among the many thousands killed by the flu pandemic was Charles Caverly.

Lovett credited Caverly with first seeing the need to understand polio. “Dr. Caverly did not live to see the disease against which he had fought so long and so untiringly really conquered and the fear of future epidemics removed,” wrote Lovett. “[B]ut he did live to see many of the victims of infantile paralysis in Vermont well on the road to happy, useful, and in some cases normal lives, and to know that real contributions to the knowledge of the disease had been made by those working in cooperation with the State Board of Health under his presidency.”

FDR

In 1921, a wealthy, influential 39-year-old named Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio. Five years later he founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, after the waters he’d taken for therapy. Later it was renamed the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP).

Franklin Roosevelt taking a therapeutic plunge in Warm Springs, Ga.

Then in 1938, five years into his presidency, Roosevelt kicked off the NFIP’s March of Dimes campaign to raise money for polio research. The public sent 2,680,000 dimes to the White House.

Many scientists had already started work on a vaccine or a cure for polio. In the United States, scientists conducted research at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Cincinnati.

During the mid-1950s, Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh tested a polio vaccine. In April 1955, banner headlines announced the great news: tests had proven Salk’s vaccine successful.  The government then mobilized a massive public health effort to vaccinate every child in America. By 1991, polio was eradicated in the Western Hemisphere.

Polio, The Beginning of the End

Sara Jones had gotten the disease at two years old, one of the first Otter Creek Valley victims in 1894. Polio had paralyzed her legs. For the next 20 years she dragged herself around her North Ira farm. Finally, a doctor operated on her feet so she could wear shoes. The next year she got her first pair of crutches, and in 1955 she got her first wheelchair.

On Jan. 5, 1956, Sara Jones attended the NFIP’s kickoff of its national fundraising campaign on the side of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont. The Dartmouth Outing Club built a snow sculpture of Dr. Jonas Salk, and Olympic gold medalist Tenley Albright figure-skated for attendees. At night, a torchlight parade was held, and a monument shaped like a dime was dedicated to those first 132 victims.

With thanks to The “New Disease” strikes the Otter Creek Valley by Edward Neuert and to Infantile Paralysis in Vermont.

Images: Otter Creek By Chumash11 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73732544. This story updated in 2023.

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The Sparrow Hawk: When Indians and Pilgrims Rescued America’s First Shipwreck Victims

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In 1863, a storm uncovered the bones of a ship that might have been the Sparrow Hawk, sunk off Cape Cod in 1626. William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, had described it, making it the first recorded shipwreck in American history. And since both Nauset Indians and Pilgrims helped the survivors, it was also the first recorded mutual aid rescue.

Local people recovered the wreck and reassembled it on Boston Common. Then in 1889, 109 timbers of the Sparrow Hawk found their final home at the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Mass.

In April 2022, three scientists announced their finding that the wood discovered on Cape Cod had belonged to an early seventeenth-century English vessel. That made it extremely probable the wreck was, indeed, the Sparrow Hawk – the one described by Bradford.

For historians, the Sparrow Hawk was more than a shipwreck. The story of the victims’ rescue showed the Nauset and the Pilgrims had repaired their sometimes rocky relationship.

Wreck of the Sparrow-Hawk

The Pilgrims had antagonized the Nauset when they first landed. They did it by stealing a cache of their buried corn in Truro. Within the previous 20 years, European explorers had also not endeared themselves to the Cape Cod natives. Samuel de Champlain’s two visits had resulted in fights and deaths. Martin Pring and his men had  to leave in a hurry after staying for two months. The worst, Thomas Hunt, had captured 27 natives from Cape Cod and Plymouth, taken them to Spain and sold them into slavery.

Then in 1621, a Plymouth teenager named John Billington got lost and ended up with the Nausets on Cape Cod. The colonists found out where he was. They were anxious about getting him back from the people they’d robbed, but their visit to the Cape ended well. They retrieved the boy, paid back the Nauset for the corn they’d stolen and made peace with Aspinet, the tribe’s sachem.

Following the Billington mission, several parties of Plymouth colonists travelled to the area to trade with the local Indians.

Then in December 1626, a ship from England bound for Jamestown, Va., ran aground during a storm in the waters off of Pleasant Bay, in what is now Orleans. William Bradford described the wreck in his history. The rescue began a heritage of shipwrecks and lifesaving that has endured for nearly four hundred years.

bradford

William Bradford

Mutual Aid

The first responders to this wreck were the local Indians, who approached the passengers and crew as they made their way to shore. The wariness of the survivors was no doubt ameliorated when the approaching Indians called out to them in English. Bradford describes the scene:

But shortly after they saw some Indians come to them in their canoes, which made them stand upon their guard; but when they heard some of the Indians speak English unto them, they were not a little relieved, especially when they heard demand if they were the Governor of Plimoth’s men or friends; and that they would bring them to the English houses or carry their letters.

The survivors sent two men and a letter with the Indians to Plymouth. Governor Bradford personally led the rescue mission. He assembled a crew, had a boat readied and traversed Cape Cod Bay to Namskaket Creek (now the border of Brewster and Orleans). He then crossed two miles over the future Orleans to the site of the wreck. They carried supplies and repair materials with the help of the Indians. After a failed attempt to repair the ship, they brought the survivors back to Plymouth.

The episode shows that relations between the colonists and Indians had improved significantly, and that the peace agreement reached in Nauset in 1621 was working.

Leander Cosby, of Orleans, Mass., standing with remains of the 1626 shipwreck Sparrow Hawk, on Boston Common. Cosby, an early visitor to the wreck site, helped excavate and preserve it. Photo courtesy Pilgrim Hall Museum.

Family Lore

The country was in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 when the remains of a ship surfaced in what was called “Old Ships Harbor” in the vicinity of the 1626 wreck. The shipwreck was recovered, and analysis at the time determined that the remains came from that first wreck described by Bradford.

A local resident named Sparrow reported that Indian legend, passed on to his family, indicated that the ship’s name was the Sparrow Hawk. Since the time the remains went to Boston, people have called it the Sparrow Hawk, though no record exists of the ship’s actual name.

Sparrow Hawk Identified

Three scientists have since tried to authenticate the 1863 findings. Their findings, published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, also included more information about the passengers on the Sparrow Hawk. The researchers are Calvin Mires, a maritime archeologist and researcher with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Aiofe Daly, an associate professor at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen; and Fred Hocker, research director at the Vasa Museum in Sweden.

They scientifically dated the wood using tree-ring analysis and a technique called wiggle-match dating, which put the ship’s construction between 1556 and 1646.  They also concluded the ship’s timbers came from English wood, and that English shipbuilders had made the vessel. Those findings made it very, very probable that the ship was indeed the Sparrow Hawk.

“How many other early seventeenth-century English vessels are likely to have been lost in the same place?,” they wrote.

The Sparrow Hawk at Pilgrim Hall. Photo: Ron Peterson

More About the Sparrow Hawk

In their report, the scientists added more information about the passengers aboard the Sparrow-Hawk. Two of them, John Fells and John Sibsey, were English planters who hoped to build tobacco farms in Virginia. They had brought the rest, farmers and indentured Irish servants. During the six-week voyage, the captain had gotten scurvy and they ran out of water and beer.

The Pilgrims gave them some land to keep them busy and fed for nearly a year. Then they found passage on other boats to Virginia.

Today, the Sparrow Hawk’s timbers are on display at the Pilgrim Hall Museum.

End Notes

Images: Sparrow Hawk timbers PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21038030. Pinnace By Halfblue, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3697704. Pilgrim Hall Museum By Giorgio Galeotti – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50915900.

Ron Petersen co-authored this story. He is the chair of the Orleans Massachusetts Historical Commission. Ron has also served on the Orleans Community Preservation Committee, as chair of both the Orleans Historical Markers Committee and the 1918 Attack on Orleans Committee. He is a former board member and officer of the Orleans Historical Society, and is a board member and historian for the Orleans Firebirds of the Cape Cod Baseball League.  Ron has written numerous published articles on regional history, and has lectured throughout Cape Cod on various historical topics.

This story was updated in 2023. 

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The Jurassic Armored Mud Balls of the Connecticut River Valley

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Among the oldest sources of local pride in the Connecticut River Valley are the rare and rarely seen Jurassic Armored Mud Balls.

An armored mud ball consists of a large ball of mud coated with gravel and sand that turned into rock over many, many years. They range from two inches to 20 inches. They start off as chunks of clay broken off from a stream bank and then rolled downstream, collecting the sand and gravel.

Usually they disintegrate, but when buried before they dry they turn into rocks – “lithified” in geologists jargon. Geologists use them to date ancient streams.

A Jurassic armored mud ball embedded in rock.

The ones found in Turners Falls date to the Jurassic period, some 200 million to 145 million years ago.

Geologist Richard Little calls them “interesting, amusing and rare.”

Jurassic Armored Mud Balls

Little, professor emeritus of Greenfield Community College, wants the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to recognize the Jurassic armored mud balls as the official “state sedimentary structure.”

He notes Massachusetts has a state bean (Navy), muffin (corn), donut (Boston Crème)  and cat (Tabby). The Legislature has also elevated other rocks to official status, such as Dighton Rock, a boulder with mysterious writing on it found in the Taunton River. It also has an Official Historical Rock, Plymouth, though the Pilgrims didn’t step on it. Finally, there’s the official Rolling Rock – not the beer, but the one in Fall River that rocks back and forth.

So why not an Official Jurassic Armored Mud Ball?

The Geology Path at Greenfield Community College

Only in Franklin County

They have also been found in other places, including the base of the clay cliffs at Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard. Other U.S. locations include Washington, Montana, Wyoming and in a ravine in northeastern Monroe County, Indiana. And outside of the U.S., people have found them in Greenland; Spitzbergen Ecuador, Trinidad, France and Yorkshire, England.

But to date, people can only see them easily in Franklin County, Mass. That’s where Richard Little first laid eyes on them. He noticed them in an old abutment to a bridge that used to connect Gill and Turners Falls, a village in Montague. The stone blocks used in the abutment had been quarried nearby.

The old bridge connecting Turners Falls to Gill

Ironically, the Jurassic armored mudballs in the bridge abutment are only two miles from dinosaur footprints. The Connecticut River Valley has quite a few of them, too, preserved in sedimentary rock.

Little has found eight places where people can see the armored mud balls, all in Franklin County. They include the Geology Path at Greenfield Community College, Unite Park in Turners Falls, the Gill Bridge Cable Anchor and the Stop & Shop in Greenfield.

Here’s Professor Little explaining what they are:

Steve Mabee, the state geologist, recognizes it as “one of the rarest structures in the world…only found here in Massachusetts.”

For more information, https://armoredmudballs.rocks.

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Fletcher, Vermont: The Town That Escaped the 1918 Pandemic (This One, Too)

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The 1918-20 influenza pandemic reached deep into every neighborhood in every town and city in the United States – well, almost. It turns out that seven communities pretty much escaped the deadly virus. Fletcher, Vt., was one of them.

What makes the case of Fletcher so puzzling is that the tiny Northern Vermont town didn’t do anything special to prevent the flu from spreading. And what could have easily turned into super-spreader events just didn’t.

Fletcher Meeting House

Researchers who studied the spread of the 1918-20 pandemic couldn’t figure out why, of the seven so-called “escape communities,” Fletcher pretty much dodged the flu. The others had taken drastic measures, such as barricading highways, quarantining all visitors and requiring masks. Fletcher, not so much.

But there must be something about Fletcher, which bills itself as “a nugget of beauty in Northern Vermont.” Because Fletcher has had the fewest cases of COVID-19 in Vermont, according to the state’s Department of Health.

Worse Than COVID-19

Estimates of the number of people killed by the 1918 flu pandemic range from 15 million to 100 million. In comparison, the COVID-19 pandemic killed 5.8 million people by Feb. 11, 2022, according to the World Health Organization.

The disease, known then as the Spanish flu, struck young adults hardest. By some estimates, it killed as many as 10 percent of all young adults in the world.

More people died from the 1918 flu epidemic in a year than from the Black Death in a century. It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS killed in 24 years. It was probably the deadliest disease in history.

Victims of the 1918 flu epidemic

Waves of Spanish Flu

The flu came in four waves.

From February until May of 1918, the Spanish flu first popped up in several places, including Kansas, California, Michigan and New York. It didn’t kill an unusual number of people, though, and health officials treated it like any other flu.

U.S. Army Field Hospital, Hollerich, Luxembourg

Then it mutated into a virulent killer of young adults at the worst possible time — just as the United States mobilized for World War I. Millions of troops traveled by rail and ship across long distances and then lived in close quarters.

The mutated virus showed up in mid-August in Brest, France and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Then two soldiers reported sick on Commonwealth Pier in Boston on August 27. The flu rapidly spread to Camp Devens in Ayer, Mass., just 35 miles away. Devens became an epicenter of the second wave.

By September, 14,000 people at Devens caught the flu and 757 died. Bodies stacked up like cordwood in the morgue.

One doctor described how quickly the flu killed:

[W]hen 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 the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate…

Tending a patient at Fort Devens.

Flu Comes to Vermont

That deadly second wave from Camp Devens hit Vermont hardest. Just weeks after the two soldiers arrived on Commonwealth Pier, Vermont health officials declared the flu a “contagious and infectious disease.” That gave local health officers the authority to placard houses where flu patients lived. The state asked flu patients to quarantine for a week, their close contacts for four days.

People who had visited sick friends or relatives at Camp Devens brought the disease to Vermont. The flu arrived on the train and got off at railroad stations in St. Johnsbury, St. Albans, White River Junction and Rutland.

St. Albans train station, 16 miles from Fletcher

Some towns, like Stowe, Rutland and Shelburne, banned public gatherings, including school and church services.

The number of severely ill flu patients overwhelmed hospitals in Massachusetts and Vermont. By mid-September, Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge, a Vermont native, asked Vermont Gov. Horace Graham for doctors and nurses. Graham turned him down – Vermont had enough problems of its own.

Then on Oct. 4, 1918, Graham banned all public gatherings in the state. The closure order lasted until November 3.

Gov. Horace Graham

The third and fourth waves, scattered and less severe: the third wave spiked again from January to April 1919, and then a fourth and final wave in December 1919 to January 1920.

In 1918, the flu hit 13 percent of the population and was responsible for a quarter of all Vermont deaths that year.

But it didn’t kill anyone in Fletcher.

Escape Communities

In 2005, the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency went to the University of Michigan with a request. Would the university’s Center for the Study of the History of Medicine (CSHM) conduct a research project on communities that escaped the deadly 1918-20 flu epidemic?

The CSHM identified seven, including a military base, two colleges, a tuberculosis sanitarium and a home for the blind. And two isolated towns – Gunnison, Colo., and Fletcher, Vt.

Gunnison, like Fletcher, was a small, rural mountain town in Colorado, but along a major rail line. The town closed itself off from the outside world, barricading roads, restricting rail travel, closing schools and banning public gatherings. No one caught the flu in the town.

Gunnison, aerial view

Yerba Buena Island, the San Francisco Naval Training Station, sequestered its 6,000 inhabitants on the island. Anyone coming to the island had to wear masks, get their throats sprayed with argyrol solution and quarantine for several days. After the island reopened on Nov. 21, 1918, 25 cases of the flu were reported and five died.

Fletcher didn’t do any of those things.

Fletcher

In 1918, Fletcher was a farming town in northern Vermont with 737 residents, located 35 miles from Burlington.

As influenza spread across Northern Vermont in mid-September, Fletcher residents attended a Red Cross dance in town. Several days later, many went to the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, 20 miles away. Then on September 18, a soldier arrived to get married in Fletcher — from Camp Devens. At the reception, 120 people showed up.

By September 27, flu patients overcrowded the hospital in St. Albans and the town closed its schools. But Fletcher, 16 miles away, didn’t report its first case until October 13. There would only be one more that year, and both survived.

Then during the next wave of flu in 1919, two more came down with the flu and school closed – but no one died from the disease.

Why? It remains a mystery. The federal government investigated the seven municipalities — and concluded the town may have been lucky.

“The tiny village of Fletcher, Vermont proved to be the most provisional of the provisional escape communities we studied,” CSHM researchers wrote. “Fletcher’s experience during the 1918–1920 influenza epidemic may simply have been shaped by good fortune, remote location, and viral normalization patterns.”

Fletcher Today

The mystery continues to this day.

In 2020, Fletcher had a population of 1,346, certainly a small town. Vermont, however, has many smaller towns. And none have had fewer COVID-19 cases than Fletcher.

The Vermont Department of Health reported six cases of COVID-19 in Fletcher from March 5, 2020 to Feb. 9, 2022.

Only Ira, which has one-third of Fletcher’s population has had as few cases. Norton, with 169 residents, reported 21 cases of the virus. Lemington, with 104 people, had 10. Brunswick, with 112, had 16.

A crossroad in Fletcher today.

In 2020, reporters Erin Petenko and Mike Dougherty from the VTDigger went to Fletcher. They asked local residents why they thought the town escaped the flu back in the day.

Nancy Cardinal, who runs the general store, credited the farmer’s homebound and outdoorsy lifestyle.

“It’s very simple out here,” she said. “We kind of live in our own little world.”

Images: Fletcher Meeting House By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8687703. Sick soldiers By Name not stated – Images from the History of Medicine (IHM), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47633085. Aerial view of Gunniston By formulanone – https://www.flickr.com/photos/formulanone/50637863171/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114360935. Fletcher crossroads courtesy Google Maps.

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