Smallpox outbreak affected thousands

Editor’s Note: Wayne Reilly worked as a reporter, editorial page writer and assignment editor for 28 years at the Bangor Daily News. Starting today, his history column will appear each Monday in the Style section.

“Not for a long time have the people of Orland been so worried,” reported the correspondent for the Bangor Daily Commercial a century ago on Oct. 1, 1903. “Men have forgotten to argue about religion or politics. They no longer talk about silos or stock. All that’s … spoken about is the smallpox situation.”

Daniel O’Hearn had come down from Brewer to visit his father-in-law, Reuben Hutchins, when he began exhibiting symptoms of the dread disease. Dr. Croxford quarantined the Hutchins home, located on the Castine Road, along with the home of O’Hearn’s brother-in-law, Ralph Ginn, where the millworker had stopped off on the way.

A few days later the rumors were flying, and Dr. Croxford had the opportunity to vaccinate 100 people, including 13 on Sunday, Oct. 4, his day off. Back then, many people were afraid of the smallpox vaccine and there was no law in Maine mandating inoculation in the general population.

In a few days O’Hearn was reported to be feeling much better, and people were speculating whether his face would be disfigured by the disease’s telltale scars.

“People in town are losing much of their nervousness …,” wrote the correspondent. “They are beginning to realize the foolishness of much of the talk. … There never has been any danger whatever.”

Orland people thought smallpox was a problem only in towns upriver. But the reporter obviously had not talked to state health officials who were literally running scared to quell the smallpox epidemic, now in its third year in Maine and growing. O’Hearn’s case was only one small incident that happened to make the papers as the outbreak was peaking. In 1903 and in the year before, 2,318 Mainers had come down with a mild form of the illness, their symptoms sometimes mistaken for chickenpox. Only 21 people died, according to a report by

State Board of Health. Thus, while the story today sounds like a medieval or terrorist-inspired nightmare, it was mild compared to the Spanish Flu outbreak a few years later.

The epidemic hit northern and eastern Maine hardest. Health officials blamed it on the movement of loggers from other states and Canada to the camps sprinkled throughout the vast, sparsely populated regions north of Bangor.

To combat it, Gov. Hill and the Executive Council signed a law on Sept. 22 requiring men who wanted to work in the camps to show “a good vaccination scar” and a doctor’s certificate.

That followed almost exactly a decade after another law was passed requiring workers to be vaccinated in paper mills where rags were used. The rags helped spread the disease. The older law had halted the outbreak in those mills.

This time around, officials set up inspection and detention stations to isolate the sick and those suspected of being sick at Sandy Bay Township on the old Canada Road above Jackman and at Lowelltown, the first station on the Canadian Pacific Railroad coming into Maine east of Megantic, Quebec. The federal government set up another station at Glazier Lake with the cooperation of New Brunswick officials.

Managing the disease once it hit the logging camps took huge amounts of time and manpower. A small army of doctors, nurses and “trained disinfectors” fanned out through the north woods whenever a case was reported, even if it was only a rumor.

The state’s policy was to isolate the sick, to vaccinate the healthy, to disinfect the camps with a solution of formaldehyde and to give the convalescents disinfectant baths.

Despite the crisis, apathy and resistance from some lumber camp owners, town officials and individuals living in quarantined areas hindered the state’s efforts. Some lumbermen started a movement to repeal the new law, while a few towns ignored it to avoid the expense.

Some of the sick violated their quarantines despite fines. In the Pearly Brook section of Fort Kent, for example, two men were taken to court and fined after going into town. Placards were torn down along with a barricade on the road to the neighborhood. One young man was castigated for going to church.

State officials threatened to quarantine the entire town of St. Agatha after locals refused to spend any money to deal with an outbreak of 17 cases. Each town where the disease appeared was supposed to build a “transportable disinfecting booth,” and some had pest houses.

Doctors and other health workers were the unsung heroes of the campaign. They traveled through deep snow and mud over woods roads and swollen streams by wagon and boat.

“After spending the night at ‘s and feeding a small million of bed-bugs, I proceeded across Grand Lake in a canoe and then walked down the river bank some five miles, and then went a few miles in a batteau,” grumbled one doctor on his way to Haskell Rock on the East Branch of the Penobscot River.

The day before he had gone from Patten to Grand Lake traveling over a 30-mile tote road in mud that sometimes covered the wheel hubs of his wagon.

“Patten would be a fine opening for the cruelty-to-animals man, or for turkey buzzards,” he wrote, commenting on the poor quality of his horses.

After quarantining a camp at Merrill Plantation, another doctor recounted tracking down fleeing, unvaccinated men late at night in 10 degree below zero temperature guided by a drunken wagoner “said to be slightly non compos mentis when sober.”

Tales like this were common, but they didn’t hit the Bangor papers to any great degree until the fall of 1903, when the brunt of the outbreak spread south from the logging camps and Aroostook County communities. Especially hard hit were Bangor, Old Town and Brewer.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.