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1854–1855 · the season of trouble
The epidemic of 1854 was worse than the poverty. Cholera struck the community in the summer of 1854. Among the first taken was Father Cointet, dead that August, his health already shaken by heading the congregation's New Orleans orphan asylum; Father Curley, ordained the year before, died, and "some twenty other members of the community" with them, in the jubilee history's count — its Morrissey chapter says "nearly twenty." The city's epidemics record, built from Sorin's own letters, counts eighteen community deaths including three students, on a dated list running from 17 July to 26 September. The counts stand in the two records as their carriers give them and are not reconciled here. What the institutional record adds is the consequence: "more, we might say all, had been taken down by the disease"; the college, which had served as a hospital, had to be renovated from top to bottom; and the trial was "more trying than had been the poverty, cold, and exposure of their first winter."
The cure was engineering. The marsh between the lakes, blamed for the sickness, could not be drained because the lakes' outlet ran through a neighbor's land; after the epidemic the owner offered to sell on even better terms than had been proposed to him before. The congregation bought, the lakes were lowered and the swamp drained, a trunk sewer was later built through the ravine to the river, and the jubilee history closes the account: "since that time Notre Dame has been one of the healthiest places" in its region. The same purchase procured the high ground above the river where St. Mary's Academy was erected the following year — the epidemic bought the sisters their home. Benefactors of the recovery are named in the record: Mr. and Mrs. Phelan of Lancaster, Ohio.
- A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
- Sorin's letters, as carried in this project's epidemics record