1855 yellow fever victims lay beneath Ghent intersection
NORFOLK — You may have passed the spot dozens or even hundreds of times on your morning commute or walking around Ghent.
It’s a nondescript patch of grass at the bustling intersection of Hampton Boulevard and Princess Anne Road, with a few trees around a raised mound in the middle.
But beneath the small park lie the remains of an untold number of people who were killed during a viral outbreak that ravaged the area 165 years ago — long before anyone had heard of the coronavirus.
“In memory of the victims of the yellow fever epidemic of 1855,” reads the inscription on a weathered plaque on the mound, often hidden in the shade.
No one knows exactly who they are, or how many found their final resting place there. It was a neighborhood burial site likely added to over the course of months, according to local historians. There’s been no evidence of gravestones — only the wealthy at the time usually got them — and coffins were in short supply once the death toll started rising.
That toll peaked at about 60 people per day, said Lon Wagner, who wrote a 14-part series about the Norfolk epidemic in The Virginian-Pilot in 2005. That was in a city home at the time to only about 16,000 people, many of whom had already fled the outbreak.
“It’s pretty interesting now how we’re talking about how to ‘flatten the curve,’” Wagner said in a recent interview. “Of course no one knew about that in 1855.”
Yellow fever is a viral infection, often found in tropical and subtropical areas of Africa and South America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is usually spread to people by infected mosquitoes.
The epidemic that plagued Norfolk and Portsmouth that summer would eventually kill more than 3,000 — and likely many more whose records were not kept, including slaves.
It all started with a ship.
The Benjamin Franklin steamer pulled into Fort Norfolk on June 7, 1855. It left two weeks earlier from St. Thomas in the Caribbean and was bound for New York “but it was massively leaking,” Wagner said.
“As far as they could make it was Norfolk. They let it into the shipyard to be repaired and that was when the virus took off.”
Yellow fever outbreaks from trade ships coming from South America had already happened the two previous years in New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah. Health officials in Norfolk were supposed to ensure everything was good to go before allowing people to get off in town, but the captain lied about sickness on board, Wagner said.
In reality, the crew already had tossed an infected mattress and hid a corpse in a coffin. Some even jumped overboard to take their chances swimming ashore.
While the ship was docked in Portsmouth’s Gosport Shipyard awaiting repairs, mosquitoes bearing yellow fever were breeding in rain barrels. Soon the disease spread.
A Portsmouth doctor recorded the first cases in late June, and the infection started to hop around Irish tenements there and in Norfolk when people went there to get away.
News about the outbreak was suppressed until it was too late. The mayor of Norfolk died. So did the president of the railroad. The police chief, too. John Colley, the shipbuilder for whom the Norfolk avenue is named, died along with three of his sons. Even the head of the relief association set up to help was struck down.
“Everything shut down more or less because the people who were running things died,” Wagner said.
Estimates say about 80% of Norfolk’s population fled once the epidemic became apparent, heading to Richmond, Baltimore, New York or Virginia’s mountain resorts out west.
“There were so many Norfolk and Portsmouth people in New York that at one point they ran out of black (clothing) in New York for people to wear to mourn their relatives,” Wagner said.
As for those remaining, “you couldn’t get caskets. People were afraid you could get the virus from a deceased person so no one wanted to take their loved one even to the cemetery.”
The roughly 3,000 estimated to have died in that outbreak almost certainly is a vast undercount. Who would know if you dropped from the virus while trying to get out of town, or in your home with no loved one to report it?
Donna Bluemink has been painstakingly documenting the region’s yellow fever history for years and provided much of the research for Wagner’s series. Her online research compendium includes the names of hundreds who died.
Bluemink said in an email that it’s unlikely the Princess Anne site was a “mass grave” with many people in one plot. Rather it was a neighborhood burial site.
“People died for several months and a single grave would not be opened over and over,” she wrote. However, “as there were a few thousand folks dying of yellow fever, it is safe to say both Portsmouth and Norfolk have mass graves.”
It’s unclear where exactly they are. It’s presumed the Cedar Grove and Elmwood cemeteries each have yellow fever mass graves, Bluemink said, but they have never been specifically located.
“In Cedar Grove there are family sites with only one memorial and this certainly is a possibility as members of a family died within days of each other,” she added.
The graves at the Princess Anne intersection remained somewhat of a rumor for a long time.
In 1955, city officials agreed to look into whether the small park was a yellow fever burial ground. One engineer told The Virginian-Pilot at the time that he recalled the city moving some bodies from the corner to the Forest Lawn Cemetery in 1923 during the widening of Princess Anne Road.
In 1993, a Girl Scout troop successfully organized an effort for the memorial plaque at what’s now Yellow Fever Park, including a garden with 1,000 yellow crocuses and daffodils as a tribute to the unknown victims.
“It seemed like an open wound that needed to be closed,” the troop’s leader told the Norfolk Compass.
Wagner, who’s been working to turn his series into a book, said he’s been thinking recently about parallels between the Norfolk outbreak and the current coronavirus pandemic.
There’s the ship as a vector — in 1855, a cargo ship; for us, luxury cruises.
The government downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak is another commonality, he said. A doctor in China who spoke up about what he was seeing — and later died of the coronavirus — was silenced. Wagner said a Norfolk doctor who raised the alarm about yellow fever was widely mocked.
The idea of mass graves might seem like it’s one difference between the eras.
In New York, however, where COVID-19 claimed 799 people in a single day last week, officials are considering temporary mass graves as a way to accommodate the dead. The city of New York recently hired contract laborers to help bury more dead on an island already used for interring those with no known family.
A Virginia Department of Health spokeswoman said in an email that their current models projecting deaths from the virus “do not suggest a need for temporary burial.”
What saved Norfolk back in the 19th century was the social distancing of its time — it helped that so many people fled the region, Wagner said.
“That really was the cowardly, great strategy. To just get away.”
Katherine Hafner, 757-222-5208, katherine.hafner @pilotonline.com