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Epidemics & Public Health · the systematic record
This section is the epidemic and public-health record of Fort Wayne, from the fevers of the settlement era to the department that guards the county's health today. The one great pandemic of the twentieth century is told elsewhere: the influenza of 1918–19, which reached the city in September 1918 and whose Allen County death toll the record never fixed, is in the Story of Fort Wayne, and is cross-referenced here in a line rather than retold. Everything else is here in order — the ague country that made the Maumee headwaters notorious, the cholera scourge of 1849, the recurring killers of the well-and-privy city, the long war against tuberculosis, the polio summers, and the slow building of the machinery — boards, pest houses, inspectors, laboratories — that fought them. Where the sources give two numbers, both stand. Where a death toll was never compiled, the record says so. One institution here is the county's rather than the city's: the Irene Byron Tuberculosis Sanatorium stood in Perry Township, but it was Fort Wayne's tuberculosis hospital in everything but jurisdiction, and it is included on that footing.
The sickly country · the ague years
THE DISEASE ENVIRONMENT · THE SETTLEMENT ERA TO THE 1850S
Fort Wayne was planted in a marsh. West of the town, beginning about two miles out along the St. Marys, lay a wide grassy marsh and wet prairie; a few miles east stretched the edge of the Great Black Swamp; and the three rivers met in sluggish water on low ground. The price of the site was fever. Dr. B. S. Woodworth, whose recollections Frank Deldine gathered for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in 1914, called chills and fever "a great epidemic of the Maumee valley, a terror to the newcomers" — the shaking ague that returned day after day or every other day, beaten down only by quinine, the one effective medicine of the era, and liable to return with the next season. Breaking new ground made it worse: the ague, in the local understanding, was aggravated by the opening up of new land, and the fevers "reached a climax during the years of construction of the Wabash and Erie Canal, when the deep rich soil was stirred up" along the line of the diggings.
The worst of it came in the seasons the old doctors named. Dr. M. M. Latta, another of the early practitioners whose accounts Deldine preserved, recorded a typhoid-pneumonia epidemic in the winter of 1834–35, and then 1838 — "the sickly season." That year the rains failed from July 10 to October 10, the heat stood unbroken, and some ninety percent of the people were sick: malarial complaints, Latta judged, with slight mortality but misery enough to check immigration into the valley. From the spring of 1844 an epidemic of erysipelas ran for years, to 1852, accompanied by puerperal fever. What the era believed caused it all, Griswold's syllabus states in four words: "The cause — the Black swamp." The miasma theory was wrong about the mechanism and right about the map: the fevers belonged to the wet ground, and they faded as the wetlands were drained and the town rose onto filled, paved streets. The early disease environment is preserved in Geller and Circle, History of Public Health in Fort Wayne and Allen County (1990), printing Woodworth's and Latta's accounts from Frank P. Deldine's historical writings in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, July 19, 1914; the believed cause is from the syllabus of Griswold's Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), chapter XXXII.
Cholera comes up the canal · the visitations before the scourge
CHOLERA · THE 1830S AND 1840S
Cholera traveled the same waterways that built the town. Griswold traces the pandemic that reached Fort Wayne from its outbreak at Lahore in 1845, across Europe, to New York and New Orleans in 1848. For the earlier visitation of the 1830s — the epidemic that swept the country in 1832 reached Indiana hard enough that Governor Noah Noble proclaimed October 18, 1832 a state day of fasting and prayer — no Fort Wayne-specific record has been found; the town's cholera story, as the surviving record tells it, begins with the scourge of 1849. Dr. Woodworth dated the disease's arrival in the Maumee valley to 1848, its first victim a canal laborer taken ill at a house in the eastern part of the town; Griswold's chapter dates the scourge itself to the summer of 1849, and the council minutes bear the later date out. Both datings stand in the next entry, where the main account is told. Sources: Griswold (1917), chapter XXXII; Geller and Circle (1990), the state survey and the Deldine-Woodworth account.
The scourge · cholera in 1849
CHOLERA · SUMMER AND FALL 1849 · GRISWOLD'S ACCOUNT, CHAPTER XXXII
The city saw it coming and armed itself with the only weapons it had. On January 11, 1849, the council reappointed its board of health — Drs. H. Wehmer, H. P. Ayres and C. E. Sturgis — "especially in view of the approaching cholera." On April 12, in special session, the council established a hospital at the county farm, moving Asa Fairfield's log soap-and-candle factory there for the purpose, and a second hospital in James Barnett's log house at Calhoun and Berry streets. A representative citizen in each ward was appointed to inspect the streets, alleys, stables, pig sties, privy vaults, cellars, standing pools and slaughter houses, with power to abate nuisances on the spot; handbills of instruction were put into every house, and lime and disinfectants laid in.
The disease came anyway. Its first Fort Wayne victim, as in Woodworth's telling, was a canal laborer. The Reverend Julian Benoit offered the St. Augustine's (Cathedral) schoolhouse as a hospital, and the Sisters of Charity nursed the sick. The afflicted homes lay chiefly on the east side — East Washington, East Jefferson and East Wayne streets. The stricken were carried to the hospitals or nursed where they lay, and treatment, as Griswold concedes, proved ineffectual: the favorite remedy was "tremendous doses of calomel... and cayenne pepper." Against that stood the doctors. Dr. Woodworth, himself a worker in the sickrooms, named Drs. C. E. Sturgis and H. Wehmer, who "worked together during this epidemic in every stricken home"; Deldine adds Dr. Cartwright, and Woodworth himself, to the roster of those who served.
The city's answer, when medicine failed, was civic and religious together. A citizens' meeting at the courthouse moved the council to redouble its efforts, and the council appointed the second of August as a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer, on which no secular work was to be done. On August 22 the council named a committee to procure "three strong, stout-hearted, able-bodied men to attend to the sick and suffering" — and, in Griswold's sentence, "the names of the heroes of the hour do not appear in the record." Many residents fled the town outright. The council's bills that fall tell the cost in small print: physicians' fees paid in October and November, money for lime, for bedsteads, for nursing, and for digging the grave of a child who died at the hospital.
How many died, the record gives in two voices, and both stand. Woodworth, quoted by Griswold, reckoned that "during each of the years 1849, 1852 and 1854 there were about two hundred deaths here," and Griswold's chapter carries the scourge forward as a five-year visitation that "claimed six hundred of its people before the close of the year 1854." Deldine's account, drawn from the same Woodworth, puts some two hundred deaths in the months following the August outbreak of the first year alone — noting, in the same breath, that in that terrible season there was "but very little illness from ague." The cholera returned in 1852, 1853 and 1854. In the 1852 visitation A. G. Barnett, recalling it in 1916, told how his family fled to Thomas Hamilton's home north of Leo, and how he watched "the many funerals at the Methodist church across the street" from West Berry Street. After 1854 the scourge did not return in force, and Fort Wayne's cholera era closed with it. The account is Griswold's, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), chapter XXXII, "The Cholera Scourge," corroborated in its civic detail by the city council minutes of 1849 as printed in Geller and Circle (1990); the Woodworth and Barnett recollections are quoted there and in Deldine.
Smallpox · the pest-house disease
SMALLPOX · 1844–1871
Smallpox never scoured Fort Wayne the way cholera did — Deldine judged it recurrent but "never sufficient to cause a panic" — but it returned often enough to have its own machinery. On October 15, 1844, the council met in special session on a verified case: the patient was removed to the "House for Reception of the invalid," Dr. L. G. Thompson directed to attend him, and a nurse provided. On February 3, 1845, the council ordered Ralph Wright's log house, where a case had been, cleansed and fumigated. In the cholera winter the disease knocked again: on January 21, 1849, with two cases in the city, the council appointed physicians to visit every family in Fort Wayne and urge vaccination — free at city expense for those unable to pay — and the patients were removed to the pest house.
The pest house became permanent. In 1850 the city and Wayne Township jointly arranged one — R. D. Turner's house rented until a building could be raised, the cost capped at six hundred dollars — and in 1869 the board of health's ordinance provided a brick pest house on the Poor House Farm at a cost not to exceed one thousand dollars. It was finished by January 1871 at $1,520.50 — $1,120.50 from the city, $400 from Wayne Township — at the northwest corner of the farm, and in 1870 the city engaged Samuel Baughman at twenty-five dollars a month to keep it and nurse every contagious case sent there. The board's report on 1869 counted twelve smallpox deaths, most of them unvaccinated children who had not been in the public schools; the board examined every public-school pupil itself and vaccinated 332 of them. Source: Geller and Circle (1990), from the council minutes and the board of health reports.
The killers of the well-and-privy city · the board's count for 1869
THE RECURRING KILLERS · DIPHTHERIA, SCARLET FEVER, TYPHOID, CONSUMPTION
The board of health's report on the year 1869 is the first full accounting of what killed Fort Wayne, and it is the baseline of this record. The city counted 327 deaths in 1869, and 320 in 1870, against a population of 19,480. Of 274 deaths from disease, 109 were children under two years old, fifty of them reported simply as "convulsions." Consumption — tuberculosis — stood at the head of the list with 53 deaths, a fifth of all the mortality in the city. Then came the child-killers: scarletina, or scarlet fever, 26 deaths; whooping cough, 13; smallpox, 12. Then the fevers of bad water and bad air: typhoid, 20 deaths; malarial fever, 14; pneumonia, 11. Deldine, reviewing the doctors' century, put scarlet fever's place plainly: in that era it was a killer of children, surpassed in its fatality rates only by diphtheria.
Diphtheria and scarlet fever were the standing terror of the school-age years — the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette of March 9, 1893 carried the headline "Twenty-One Diphtheria Patients in the City" as a routine bulletin of a bad week. What broke diphtheria's power was antitoxin: first used in Fort Wayne in 1895, by Geller's chronology, after which the board's reports could write that antitoxin "has been pretty generally used, and a low mortality is the result." Indiana later made diphtheria antitoxin free to any citizen too poor to buy it, the cost charged to the county, city or town — a law broadened in 1917 to tetanus antitoxin, and after to scarlet fever antitoxin and rabies vaccine — putting the specific within reach of every physician in the county whether the family could pay or not. Sources: Geller and Circle (1990), the board of health report for 1869 and the state antitoxin record; Deldine's review of the nineteenth-century diseases.
Typhoid and the water
TYPHOID · WELLS, PRIVIES, AND THE WATERWORKS ANSWER · 1869–1934
Typhoid was the disease of Fort Wayne's own plumbing. The early city drank from hand-dug shallow wells, and the same yards held the privy vaults; the seepage between them, Geller's history states flatly, made typhoid fever "very common" through the enduring years of the well-and-privy city, and the sewers — the first line was laid in 1858, driven, the History Center notes, by fear of disease as much as by flood control — emptied into the rivers. The board counted twenty typhoid deaths in 1869 alone.
The answer was built in two stages. On August 5, 1879, the citizens voted to build a waterworks and chose Charles McCulloch, Henry Monning and Chris Boseker as its commissioners; the works, designed by Josiah D. Cook with Holly steam engines drawing on deep wells, began service on December 14, 1880 — "Our water works can now be said to be completed. Water is in the main pipes," the Sentinel wrote on December 18 — at a cost of $236,865 apart from the reservoir. Half a century on, the deep wells could no longer carry the city, and Fort Wayne turned to its rivers, filtered: the Three Rivers Filtration Plant, built at Spy Run where the St. Marys and the St. Joseph meet, cost, by Geller's account, $2,500,000, and water from the plant reached the city in April 1934; the History Center dates the plant's opening to 1933. The well-and-privy city, and the typhoid that went with it, belong to the years before those two dates. Sources: Geller and Circle (1990); the Documentary History of American Water-works, from the Fort Wayne Sentinel and the water works trustees' reports; the History Center, Fort Wayne.
Tuberculosis · the long war opens
TUBERCULOSIS · THE ANTI-TUBERCULOSIS LEAGUE · 1910–1916
Consumption headed the death list in 1869 with 53 deaths, and it was still the city's great killer when the organized fight began. Griswold prints the Allen County toll from tubercular diseases for the league years: 122 deaths in 1909, 126 in 1910, 120 in 1911, 116 in 1912, 90 in 1913, 86 in 1914, 111 in 1915, 92 in 1916 — roughly a hundred Fort Wayne and county residents a year, every year.
The Fort Wayne Anti-Tuberculosis League was organized in 1910, with Dr. Eric A. Crull as president and Dr. E. M. VanBuskirk among its vice presidents. The league's instrument was the visiting nurse: it first engaged Miss Shively, and then the nurse who would give the county's hospital its name — Irene Byron, a graduate of the Hope Hospital training program, who served as the league's nurse from 1913. The money came in dimes and pennies made visible: Red Cross Christmas stamp sales in Fort Wayne ran to 286,164 stamps in 1914, 360,103 in 1915 and 455,066 in 1916 — more than any other city in Indiana, Griswold records, and second in all America. In 1915 the league established "Fort Recovery," an anti-tuberculosis settlement on a portion of the county farm northwest of the city, with the cooperation of the county commissioners and council. And in November 1916, on Byron's initiative, the Perry Randall Fresh-Air School opened at Berry and Fairfield, in space at Plymouth Congregational Church — the second school of its kind in Indiana, for nervous and anemic children, the frail pupils the league's nurses found in the classrooms before the disease itself took hold. Sources: Griswold (1917), chapter XLIX; Indiana Magazine of History, March 2021, on Irene Byron's service.
The Irene Byron Sanatorium
IRENE BYRON TUBERCULOSIS HOSPITAL · 12101 LIMA ROAD · 1916–1975 · A COUNTY INSTITUTION SERVING THE CITY
The sanatorium Irene Byron campaigned for rose out of her advocacy. As the Anti-Tuberculosis League's nurse she had originated a tent colony for the tuberculous and the fresh-air school, and she pressed the county for a real hospital. When the United States entered the World War she left Fort Wayne in 1917 for the American Red Cross and died in service — the first Indiana Red Cross nurse to die in the war. The county built the hospital she had argued for, at 12101 Lima Road in Perry Township: construction began in 1916, to the designs of the Fort Wayne architect Charles R. Weatherhogg, and in the summer of 1919 it was dedicated as the Irene Byron Tuberculosis Hospital. "1919 — Allen County's Best Investment — Irene Byron Tuberculosis Hospital," the Fort Wayne Sentinel headlined it on July 26, 1919, and Governor Goodrich's dedication address was reported in the Sentinel of August 11.
The hospital served the county — and through it the city — for two generations. Weatherhogg returned in 1934–35 to design its two physicians' residences, buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 and delisted in 2013 after the campus changed around them. The end came with the disease's retreat: in 1974 the sanatorium merged with the Allen County Health Center to form the Byron Health Center, and the tuberculosis unit closed in 1975, the disease it was built to cage no longer filling its wards. One institutional listing dates the sanatorium's closing to 1974, the merger year; the Byron community's own history separates the 1974 merger from the 1975 closing of the TB unit, and both dates stand here as given. The line did not end: the Byron Health Center's successor, Byron Wellness Community, moved to a new facility at 1661 Beacon Street in May 2020, caring for residents with chronic mental and physical conditions — the institution's work carried a century forward from the tents on the county farm. Sources: Indiana Magazine of History, March 2021; the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana's Irene Byron page, from the Fort Wayne Sentinel of July 26 and August 11, 1919; Byron Wellness Community's institutional history; the National Register record for the sanatorium physician residences.
Polio · the summer of 1916
INFANTILE PARALYSIS · 1916
The same summer Fort Wayne marched for health, it shut its doors against the new terror. The 1916 poliomyelitis epidemic — 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths across the country, Griswold records — reached Indiana, and Fort Wayne's authorities forbade the congregation of all persons sixteen years of age and under: no school, no Sunday school, no theatres, no places of assemblage of any kind. Newsboys were forbidden to sell papers on the streets, and children were required to remain at home. The opening of school, first deferred to October 1, was advanced to September 11 when the danger seemed past; "several cases" of the disease, Griswold writes, developed in Fort Wayne — he gives no count, and no local total for 1916 has been found in the record since. On September 8 a circus played the city, and its audience contained no children. Source: Griswold (1917), chapter XLIX, "The Present-Day Period."
Polio · the postwar summers
POLIO · 1949–1955 · THE IRON-LUNG YEARS
After the Second World War the disease came back every summer, and Fort Wayne's polio story is preserved in the News-Sentinel's retrospective of the 1950s, which gathered the memories while the witnesses were here to give them. In the summer of 1949 Charlie Lynn, six years old, of Huntington, was taken desperately ill and carried to Methodist Hospital on Lewis Street — the hospital that became Parkview — where he spent months recuperating. Janet Hudson of New Haven spent weeks in an iron lung, and then a year at the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in South Bend. In the fall of 1952 Sue Rowe, a second-grader at Washington Township Elementary School on Wallen Road, was diagnosed by the family physician, Dr. Fred Schoen, and treated at home. Nurse Myra Chandler, who began on Parkview's pediatric ward in 1955, spent her first years there caring for children in iron lungs.
The machines themselves were a fire department's charge. Fire Station No. 3, at Washington and Webster streets, stored the city's iron lungs, delivered them where they were needed and serviced them; in the early 1950s, nurse Florence Schaffer of Methodist Hospital recalled, the firefighters returned every three or four hours to check on a child in a lung, a duty Assistant Fire Chief Ron Hamm also remembered. Behind the summers stood the March of Dimes: the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded in 1938, whose dimes — collected in Fort Wayne as in every American city — paid for the respirators, the care, and in the end the vaccine trials themselves. Sources: Jennifer L. Boen's 1950s history retrospective, Fort Wayne News-Sentinel; the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, on the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
The vaccine close · 1955
THE SALK VACCINE · 1955
On April 12, 1955, at Ann Arbor, Dr. Thomas Francis announced the verdict of the largest field trial in medical history: the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk was "safe, effective and potent," and it was licensed the same day. The national program aimed first at the children in the disease's path — first and second graders, vaccinated through their schools and health departments — and Fort Wayne's children went through that machinery with the country's. The collapse followed at once: American cases fell from some 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 in 1957, and the iron-lung summers ended within the decade. The clinic-level local record — the dates of Fort Wayne's first school vaccinations and the Allen County totals — has not yet been pulled from the health department's own archive for this section, and stands as an open item in the notes. Sources: the University of Michigan's vaccine evaluation report, April 12, 1955; the Smithsonian Institution; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's polio record.
The machinery · boards, pest houses, inspectors
THE BOARD OF HEALTH AND ITS OFFICERS · 1842–1919
Fort Wayne's first board of health predates the worst of its epidemics. On July 15, 1842, on the motion of Mr. Cooper, the town council appointed Drs. John Evans, William H. Brooks and Bernard Sevenick as the Board of Health — a charter-era body that advised the council while the marshal and street commissioner did the enforcing. It served to April 13, 1843, and a second board followed that year, Drs. Lewis Beecher, Lewis T. Thompson and Charles Schnitz. In May 1846 the council added the city's first food inspection, appointing inspectors of flour, of beef and of pork. The cholera winter brought the board of January 11, 1849, appointed "especially in view of the approaching cholera," and in May 1850 the council made the board standing: three respectable householders, not necessarily doctors, appointed annually, with the power — the board's first main responsibility — to remove infected persons and isolate contagion at city expense.
The machinery professionalized at the century's turn. Indiana created its State Board of Health in 1881, reconstituted in 1891, and Allen County's line of health commissioners runs from 1884, the first Dr. H. V. Sweringen; of those who followed, the department roster's legible names include Dr. Carl Progler (1901–04), Dr. E. M. VanBuskirk (from 1905), Dr. Maurice Lohman (1923–24) and Dr. Paul Bailey (1939–42). The city hired knowledge by the piece: Dr. Otto Gross as city chemist in 1894; Dr. L. P. Drayer as city bacteriologist from 1895 to 1903 — "the first health officer employee ever appointed in Fort Wayne," in Geller's words, named by Mayor Chauncey B. Oakley; David McKay as dairy inspector from 1899; and on December 2, 1907, Dr. George W. Gillie as the first meat and milk inspector, the officer charged with the two foods that carried disease into every kitchen in the city. The Isolation Hospital kept attendants from 1906, and Dr. Paul C. Kucher served as meat and milk inspector from 1919, through both his war services, to 1941. And the machinery had a public face: on June 22, 1916, the city staged a civic health parade of 3,500 schoolchildren through the downtown streets — the Progressive era's faith, marched in column, that health was a thing a city could organize. Sources: Geller and Circle (1990), from the council minutes, ordinances and the department's personnel record; Griswold (1917) for the parade.
The machinery's hardest test of the century — the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which reached Fort Wayne in September 1918, put some 5,000 Allen County residents ill by the local Influenza Commission's estimate, and closed the city's schools, churches and theatres under the state order that took effect here on October 8 — is told in full in the Story of Fort Wayne, with the death toll the local record never determined; it is cross-referenced here, in this one line, rather than retold.
The department today
THE ALLEN COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH · THE MODERN CLOSE
The board of 1842 has one living heir: the joint department long known as the Fort Wayne–Allen County Department of Health, today the Allen County Department of Health, which guards the whole county's food, water, housing, clinics and vital records from its downtown offices. Its modern succession runs through the pandemic the machinery was built for: Dr. Deborah McMahan, health commissioner through the first phase of COVID-19; Dr. Matthew Sutter, appointed in 2020, who led the department through the emergency phase; and Dr. Thomas Gutwein, a Parkview emergency physician, who took office on July 19, 2022, serving alongside Dr. Anna Menze, the department's medical director, a post created in 2021. Allen County buried its COVID dead in numbers its nineteenth-century boards would have recognized: at Lindenwood Cemetery in October 2022 the community dedicated a memorial to the 1,202 lives lost to COVID-19 in Allen County. The hospitals those commissioners work beside — Parkview and Lutheran, the region's defining institutions today — are profiled in the Current record. Sources: the Allen County Department of Health, appointment notices of 2020 and July 19, 2022; the Lindenwood Cemetery COVID-19 memorial dedication, October 2022.