Raney: Thriving Chattanooga overcame nasty, 19-century epidemics

Chattanoogans have long felt that their beautiful and healthful climate was a barrier to diseases affecting Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans. Dr. James Redfield, a New York physician who came to the Cumberland Plateau in the 1850s, praised the benefits of its mountain climates in his letters. Yet, as Chattanooga became a thriving commercial metropolis, it experienced the disadvantages from that growth, arising from crowded populations, often living in unsanitary locations. In addition, the railroads brought business, people and diseases.

In November 1865, Chattanooga Mayor Richard Henderson and aldermen drafted resolutions reported in the Nov. 8, 1865, Chattanooga Daily Gazette, on the need to stop smallpox. Chattanooga’s population had doubled, and many lived in dirty hovels on crowded, unclean streets. The resolutions called for dispersal of all “assemblages” in the city, any loiterers to be arrested or removed, and all homes to be thoroughly cleaned. Since many public buildings had been destroyed, officials also asked to use the outbuildings at the mouth of Citico Creek (near today’s Lincoln Park) for a pest house to isolate cases.

Smallpox came to Chattanooga again in 1874 and killed 20 individuals. In 1882, anyone visiting the infected without permission was charged a misdemeanor. City physicians repeatedly demanded pesthouses, new sewers, clean privies and streets, and above all mandatory vaccinations. In 1884, city physician Dr. G.W. Drake required “compulsory vaccination of all the well … isolation of the sick (in a pesthouse) … disinfection of rooms, furniture, and clothing,” thus virtually stamping out smallpox in Chattanooga. The U.S. experienced its last case in 1949.

The first case of what became the cholera epidemic came in 1873 with a brakeman on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. He had boarded the train ill with diarrhea and was “ready for his coffin” within a few hours. Mrs. Richards, who operated a boarding house for several railroad employees, next succumbed to the sickness. Cholera is a bacterial infection spread mostly by unsafe food and water that results in severe dehydration. Inhabitants of poor shanties living in lower marshy elevations with limited clean water died most quickly. Almost 2,000 Chattanoogans left the city for higher and healthier topography.