The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The forgotten soldier
The story of Mary Camilla Nurney still awaits an ending.
She’s been dead for 102 years, but never really got her due as a veteran. That’s why it’s worth reframing her story on this Veterans Day of 2020.
Nurney’s brief but remarkable contribution to service at wartime was revived in 2014 after Stamford History Center volunteer Dan Burke came across mention of her in a 1918 book by Charles Crandall that was apparently published by the Stamford Advocate.
A few weeks ago, while researching Connecticut life during the 1918 pandemic, I found more details about Nurney that were cloaked by the fog of time (and search engine limitations).
In October 1918 Mary was living at 12 Oak Hill St., a mere stroll from Stamford Hospital. She graduated from the Stamford Hospital School of Nursing the previous year, and was about a week away from reporting for duty in Europe. World War I would end in a few weeks, on Nov. 11.
But this war had a battleground within city borders. Over on Fairfield Avenue, the Synthetic Color Company had been transformed into Edgewood Arsenal. U.S. soldiers were assigned to Stamford to, as the Advocate then reported, “make gas which, soon, will be rolling across No Man’s Land towards the German trenches, cutting short the careers of hundreds of German soldiers.”
“An extra hour at work means several hours of gassing the Germans,” the story continued.
The article’s author cautions local cynics that soldiers suddenly appearing in Stamford are “not as yellow as they look.” There is a cruel prophecy to these words, as the mustard gas they were manufacturing sometimes added a flaxen hue to their skin.
A different sinister threat arrived swiftly. Locals were hosting soldiers at theater productions and planning dances for them. The boys in uniform made a request for a donation of a football so they could schedule games. That all ended when the unit was seized by influenza. The city health director canceled all local activities so the soldiers wouldn’t spread the disease deeper into Stamford.
Mary Nurney had been volunteering for the Red Cross and preparing to head to Europe. She could have sat this one out. But that’s not what soldiers and nurses do.
That Sept. 24, U.S. Army trucks brought 37 soldiers to the hospital on stretchers and deposited them in a one-story “contagion” building at Stamford Hospital. During this battle 26 nurses became infected. Two caught it twice. Only Mary died.
At 89, Annelie Wild was the oldest living graduate of the nursing school in 1976 when she recounted being in the haze of the disease herself and overhearing peers saying “She’ll die just like Mary Nurney!”
Nurney died Oct. 5, but 11 days was long enough for her to earn the veneration of her patients.
They repaid her by asking for permission to provide a military escort at her funeral. As she was not a recognized soldier, this was something of a rogue operation.
The impulse is to conjure images of her funeral in black and white, but imagine the tints as if it were today. Twenty-five soldiers marching in russet boots. One carrying a flag of red and white roses, with violets used to evoke a field of blue. Six of the soldiers encircled the gray casket with scarlet roses and ivory carnations.
The majestic stone Saint John Roman Catholic Church on Atlantic Street, largely unchanged today, was crowded.
The Rev. Henry Callahan, who assisted in the celebration of the High Mass, voiced what these men silently paid testament to: While Mary had not made it to battle “to face the flashing sabre, she was a soldier nonetheless.”
The soldiers rode in two cars that escorted her hearse to St. John Cemetery on the city’s edge as the bugler played taps.
On the first anniversary of Germany signing an armistice agreement with the Allies on Nov. 11, 1918, Stamford Mayor John Treat presented silver medals to the nurses of Stamford. Mary’s alone was made of gold, and inscribed with “Non sibe. Sed patriae,” Latin for “not for self, but for country.”
Four years later, Stamford had a tally of 172 deaths attributed to influenza, which afflicted 1,832 residents (the city has passed 200 deaths from COVID-19 in 2020). City officials cited Nurney as the only woman to die in the service, and renamed Keeler Street in her honor.
The tribute was ephemeral. After Prohibition ended in 1933, the Nurney Club got a liquor license and formed on the small dead end off of West Avenue on the West Side. It was primarily a men’s social club that had some fierce bocce teams and was the occasional target of thieves (one got off with 10 packs of playing cards and two boxes of cigars). Today, Nurney Street hosts a dozen modest homes that were primarily built soon after Mary’s death.
Time hushed history to a whisper. Nurney was not subsequently counted among Stamford’s war dead. Technically, of course, she never served.
But the World War I soldiers she tended to knew the truth: Mary Camilla Nurney was one of them.
Time hushed history to a whisper. Nurney was not subsequently counted among Stamford’s war dead. Technically, of course, she never served.