100 years ago in The Saratogian

Thursday, Oct. 24, 1918. In a sign that the worst of the Spanish flu epidemic is over, Saratoga Springs city officer Dr. A. Sherman Downs has given local churches the green right to resume their normal worship schedule next Sunday.

Public schools and theaters will reopen on Monday, October 30, “unless unforeseen circumstances should arise,” The Saratogian reports. The theaters have been closed since October 3, the schools since October 7. Churches were limited to morning services on Sundays early in the outbreak, but were closed completely on October 9.

The state department of health reports today that 4,543 people outside New York City died of the flu, or from complications like pneumonia, from October 1 through October 22. Mortality statistics aren’t provided for Saratoga Springs, but in the large cities locally 152 people have died in Troy, 226 in Albany and 242 in Schenectady.

In the Spa City, Saratoga Hospital probationary nurse Alice Myers, an Ellenburg resident, dies of pneumonia early this morning, while residents are shocked to learn of the death of U.S. Navy seaman William J. Barrett at the Pelham Bay Training Station, a site hard hit by the epidemic. A cigarmaker in civilian life, Barrett lived with his aunt, Mrs. Charles A. Meehan of 145 South Broadway before enlisting last July.

“The young man was so anxious to live that he might do the work he had wanted to do for his flag and country in the service that for a time the doctors thought that by sheef force of desire he would pull through his serious illness,” a reporter writes.

Saratoga Nurse at Great French Resort

Letters home from local soldiers appear frequently in The Saratogian. Less common are letters from local women serving as wartime nurses in Europe.

Minnie Biffer is stationed at the hospital center at Vichy, “the great watering resort which is so much like Saratoga Springs. She wrote home on September 19.

Biffer writes that she didn’t know until she received an earlier letter from home that a fellow Saratogian, Private Walter N. Barrett, was convalescing at Vichy. “I could have done so much for him, although the nurses and doctors were very kind to him,” she observes, “He was a favored patient and everyone around liked him so much. He was always very happy when I saw him and thought his wounds were nothing, though I assure you they were very, very painful.”

Barrett has since returned to the U.S., but even without him, Biffer reports that Vichy has become “wholly an American village” and “one of the largest assets of the American Expeditionary Force.”