Clara Barton and Butler’s typhoid fever epidemic of 1903
It was Saturday, Dec. 12, 1903, and a devastating typhoid fever epidemic had been leaving death at the doorstep of dozens of homes throughout the small communities of Butler and Lyndora for a month.
One out every 13th person, from a combined population of 18,000, were fighting for their lives from the effects of a disease caused by Butler’s contaminated water supply.
According to 1909 History of Butler County, the water had become infected from a family stricken with typhoid. They had unknowingly allowed their human waste to drain into a small creek that fed the Thorn Run Reservoir. These waters, containing the deadly typhoid bacteria, flowed into the Connoquenessing Creek that provided Butler with its water supply.
Beginning in November and until the epidemic was officially declared over, 127 people would die and typhoid did not discriminate among its list of victims based on age.
Just a week before, 48-year-old Father Daniel Walsh from Cork, Ireland, and pastor of St. Paul Catholic Church, had died after a three-week battle with typhoid.
Blocks away in the home of Lela and Bertha Wagner on South McKean Street, being used as an auxiliary hospital, a worried mother had brought her 4-year-old little girl through the home’s front door in the hope the doctors and nurses could save a young life. Yet not even a mother’s prayers could prevent the child’s death.
A desperate cry for funds and volunteers to provide care for the sick had been issued by Butler's Burgess (mayor) to newspapers around the nation. Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie sent a $5,000 check and in her home in Glen Echo, Md., Clara Barton was reading the New York Times and saw on its pages Butler’s cry for help.
Barton in an interview with the Butler Eagle on Dec. 16 said “It was in the evening paper that I saw your mayor’s appeal. I had finished my work for the day . . . and before retiring I had been watching Butler expecting this call for aid when I saw it published to the world.“
The 81-year-old president of the American Red Cross immediately met with two of her colleagues, Dr. Julian B. Hubbell and Gen. W.H. Sears, and decided to pack their bags and board the morning train to the small Western Pennsylvania town of Butler.
As Clara Barton listened to the sound of the rails passing under her feet that Saturday on her way to Butler, my then 15-year-old grandfather A. J. Kemper was lying in his bed deathly ill on the second floor of his family’s Franklin Street home. Just days before he overheard his parents saying he was not likely to survive the brutal effects of typhoid.
He eventually gained enough strength to rise from his sick bed. Hearing his friends playing in the street, he went to his bedroom’s window. Down below his friends spied my grandfather’s emaciated figure staring back at them. So frightened by their friend’s ravaged appearance, he said they quickly turned away and escaped down the street. A.J. went on to recover from the fever.
Miss Barton, Dr. Hubbell and General Sears arrived at Butler’s Western Pennsylvania Railroad Station on East Jefferson Street on Saturday, Dec. 12, and immediately traveled up its long hill to get accommodations at the three-story Lowry Hotel at the corner of North Main and Jefferson Streets. After getting settled in their rooms, Barton and her group arrived unannounced at the borough council chambers and met with Burgess (Mayor) William M. Kennedy. Kennedy then arranged a meeting for that afternoon in the parlor of Barton’s hotel with the Relief Committee to discuss what efforts had been undertaken in Butler.
Sunday evening Clara Barton addressed an awestruck crowd of 1,000 in the United Presbyterian Church, now Saint Andrews, telling the audience the history of the Red Cross and her personal relief efforts during the Civil War, the Johnstown Flood of 1889 and the Galveston Hurricane of 1901.
According to the Dec. 17, 1903, Butler Eagle, Barton’s arrival had “made the local situation look brighter . . . [and] has been cheering to all those she had come in contact with!”
Sometime on Dec. 14 or 15, Barton toured the South McKean Street home of Lela and Bertha Wagner, who because the Butler General Hospital was filled to capacity, had donated the use of their red brick, mansard roof residence as an emergency hospital.
Other similar hospitals were opened to serve different neighborhoods throughout the town. Serving Butler’s West End, Earl Clinton donated his Standard Hotel on the southwest corner of Fairground Avenue (modern day Hansen Avenue) and Pillow Street which was staffed by two doctors and 25 nurses from Philadelphia and aptly named the “City of Brotherly Love Hospital.”
Lastly, the “Lyndora Hospital” was located in the Smith Building on Pierce Avenue and staffed by several bilingual nurses from St. Joseph’s Hospital in Pittsburgh to care for Lyndora’s largely immigrant population.
Believing the efforts being made in Butler were exemplary and having coordinated the efforts between the local relief committee and volunteers from the Pittsburgh Red Cross, MIss Barton planned to return to her home in Glen Echo, Md.
Before leaving on Dec. 16, she explained in an interview with the Butler Eagle the reason for only staying a few days, “There is not much for me to do; the relief work is moving along nicely, but I will tell the people of the world of the exact conditions I found in Butler and state that in my belief $75,000 and $100,000 is needed to carry on the relief work.”
Just before stepping on a train for her return trip, she pinned on Mrs. Jennie Graham, her daughter, Mabel, and Mrs. William M. Kennedy with Red Cross badges to begin the Butler Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Through Clara Barton’s voice telling the world of Butler’s needs, donations poured in from across the nation exceeding the town’s financial needs. The relief committee even politely turned away the generous $2,000 donation from America's first billionaire John D. Rockefeller.
History would record Clara Barton’s visit to Butler as her last relief trip on behalf of the organization she had founded in 1881. She did, however, continue to follow Butler’s typhoid fever epidemic until it had ceased to claim victims by the end of March 1904.
What her visit meant to Butler when death from typhoid was its constant companion can best be described by an unknown borough resident who poignantly reflected, “We pictured the light of the lantern going on and on through the night until it should stop over the stricken town of Butler, and the suffering people there would look upon it as the light of a great soul that came to them out of the darkness, bringing comfort, healing and the calm spirit that banishes all fear.”
Bill May is a local historian, speaker and guide.
