Fort McHenry housed Spanish flu patients

One hundred years ago at Fort McHenry, commemorating the rockets’ red glare of the War of 1812 was probably the furthest thing from people’s minds.

The fort, which had so valiantly defended Baltimore when the British were assaulting its shores, was in the midst of another battle — one about to take an unexpected turn for the worse and become far more lethal than anything that had happened during the war.

Beginning around America’s entry into World War I in 1917, the 40-plus acres surrounding the star-shaped fort had been turned into one of the country’s largest hospitals, United States Army General Hospital No. 2. Some Civil War-era buildings were used as quarters for the doctors and staff; barracks were hastily put up to house patients.

Perhaps the worst times for the fortturned-hospital were not a direct result of the war, but rather of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that would eventually kill between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide. The flu first hit Maryland in September 1918, and it quickly made its way to Hospital No. 2. Before the pandemic was over, some 300 people there came down with flu, and at least a third of them died.

The last patient left Hospital No. 2 in 1923; two years later, the fort was declared a national park. In 1927, the War Department tore down the temporary wooden buildings that had been cluttering the grounds. No traces of the World War I-era structures remain.