Typhoid and the river-water years

To the turning off of the river water — the 1890s ledger

The disease of the water supply: Typhoid fever is the epidemic disease this city's own ground explains. For the water works' first years the city drank the St. Joseph River — river water pumped at first to the standpipe — and the Rivers record of this history, built on Howard's 1907 history read first-hand, carries the works themselves: Superintendent Everett L. Abbot's first artesian well, about 110 feet deep near the pumping station, whose water rose to the surface and proved pure; well following well in the same locality, thirty-four six-inch wells in the end; and then, in Howard's plain sentence, "the river water was turned off." A second station followed with thirty-seven wells more, and the city drinks groundwater to this day. The works are Rivers'; the disease side is here, and its surviving measure is a hospital ledger.

Epworth Hospital's own patient counts for January 1897 — printed in full in the Hospitals record — stand at 132 surgical and 152 medical patients treated, and among them twenty-two cases of typhoid fever: the epidemic load of the 1890s carried at the size of the institution's own ledger, in a single winter month, in the years when the river water was still being turned off. Typhoid also stands once in the city's military record: the Wars record prints Private George C. Pease, of South Bend, dead of typhoid fever at Port Tampa, Florida, on 20 July 1898, in the Spanish-American War company's roll — the disease the camps of 1898 were known by, carried here in one line because the Wars record owns the telling. Beyond the 1897 ledger, the record reached gives no South Bend typhoid toll series — no year-by-year count of the city's typhoid dead survives in the sources, and none is printed.

Sources:

1. Rivers record of this history, from Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), read first-hand — the river-water beginning, Abbot's artesian well of about 110 feet, the thirty-four wells, "the river water was turned off," the second station's thirty-seven wells, and today's nine groundwater well fields; the works are cross-referenced here at pointer size, the disease side being this entry's.
2. Hospitals record of this history — Epworth Hospital's January 1897 patient counts (132 surgical, 152 medical, twenty-two of them typhoid fever), the institution's own ledger figures, cross-referenced here at the size the Hospitals record gives them.
3. Wars and unrest record of this history — Private George C. Pease's death of typhoid fever at Port Tampa, 20 July 1898, in the state memorial roll, named here in one line as that record owns the telling.