The Pittsfield, NH Smallpox Scare of 1863: Quarantine, Camphor and Closed Roads

The Speckled Monster Comes Home

Say the word smallpox in the Pittsfield general store in the year 1863 and you'd have seen six grown men drop their crackers back in the barrel and back out the door like the floor was afire. You younger men at the worm may never have known how a single word could empty a village. I knew it, and I mean to set it down here for you, along with some matters of the still-house that the same summer taught me.

The pox came out of the army camps. The war packed men together like salt herring, ten thousand to a field, sleeping in each other's breath, and the sickness ran through those camps over and over. Men came home on furlough or discharge carrying their muskets, their lice, and now and then the pox. Every soldier stepping off the cars at Concord got looked at the way a farmer looks at a cow that has been in the neighbour's pasture. Even Mr. Lincoln was not spared. He came home from Gettysburg that November and took to his bed with the varioloid, a light dose of smallpox, and the story goes that he said at last he had something he could give to everybody. The office-seekers crowding his door went off to pester somebody else for a fortnight, and that is the first tax policy I have ever approved of.

Folks who have not seen it think it is a rash. It is not. It starts with a fever that will bake a man, a backache like a mule's kick, and vomiting. Then the spots rise, on the face first, then the arms and legs, the palms and the soles, swelling into hard blisters round as buckshot and set so deep you can roll them under your thumb. They fill with yellow matter. The sickroom smells sweet and rotten at once, like a cellar of apples gone bad in August, and I have smelled it on my own coat sleeve a week after. Then the pocks crust, the crusts fall off, and if the man lives he is pitted for life. Many did not live.

A Cow, a Lancet, and Other Men's Scabs

There is no cure for having it, but there is one for fearing it, and that is vaccination. In 1796 an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, saw that milkmaids who had caught the cowpox from the udder did not take the smallpox. He scratched cowpox matter into a boy's arm and found it protected him. Vacca is Latin for cow, so every vaccinated man in this valley owes his face to a cow's teat. Moo, and amen.

Before Jenner it was done the rough way. In Boston in 1721 the Reverend Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston put actual smallpox matter into healthy folks. Inoculation, they called it, and somebody threw a lit grenade through Mather's window for his trouble. Bostonians have always had strong opinions.

In the backwoods, cowpox does not come by the barrel. The vaccine travelled arm to arm. You scratch it into one man, a week later he raises a fat blister, and you take matter from that blister into the next arm, like passing buckets at a barn fire. Or you wait for the sore to dry, pick off the scab, carry it in a twist of paper, then grind it, wet it and scratch it into somebody else. That is what I carried in '63: other men's scabs, in my waistcoat pocket next to my watch. I will be honest, because the dead deserve it. Arm to arm could carry a bad blood disease along with the cowpox, so I chose the healthiest arm I could find and looked the fellow over like I was buying a horse.

The Tooth-Puller Is Sent For

Rumour came up the turnpike that a furloughed soldier had come home to Barnstead with the pox. The selectmen met in the back of the store and closed the roads, with guards at the Barnstead line, on the Chichester road and at the bridge toward Loudon. Nobody came in from a sick town without a paper. The regular physicians had their hands full in Concord, and the army had taken two more for surgeons, so the town looked for any man who owned a lancet and was not afraid of blood. They found the tooth-puller: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and boiler of corn. I told them I was a dentist and not a doctor. They said the only difference was which end of the man I started screaming at. I took the job.

Every soul in Pittsfield wore a muslin bag of camphor gum on a string that summer, on the belief that the smell drove off contagion. The whole Congregational choir smelled like a sea captain's linen trunk, and the hymns sounded no better for it. Camphor does nothing against smallpox, about as much as a Bible in your hip pocket does against a cannonball. The only real armour was vaccination and keeping the sick apart, since the pox hides in a man a week or two before it shows. That is why our quarantine ran fourteen days. It is not magic. It is arithmetic.

The town kept a pest house past the settled land toward the woods: a bare board shack with one stove, one door and a kettle for boiling linen. Folks walked a quarter mile around it holding their breath.

As for the soldier, I looked him over in his mother's dooryard with a bandanna soaked in spirits over my nose. Some of his spots were fresh, some were blistered and some were crusted, all at once, and they were mostly on his chest and back. Smallpox comes up all together, every pock at the same stage, and it crowds the face and hands. Chicken pox comes in crops, a new batch every day, mostly on the body. I told him he had frightened four towns over a nursery complaint. His mother cried, he cried, and I went home and drank, which was the most reasonable of the three.

Errands of Mercy Across the Lines

A quarantine line is like a pair of corsets: it squeezes everything, and whatever gets through is worth twice the price. The guards were farm boys with fowling pieces, but I had a health pass signed by all three selectmen, letting the acting physician cross the lines at any hour on errands of mercy. My bag held a lancet, a tooth key, lint, a jar of camphor for show, and four quarts of good rye for washing wounds. I never ran so many errands or showed mercy to so many thirsty men.

The best run was a pine coffin a Barnstead tavern keeper had ordered for his mother, who was buried decent before she needed it. We lined it with straw, laid in thirty-six jars, and painted SMALLPOX on the side in red lead letters a foot high. Young Amos at the Barnstead line read the box by lantern light, went the colour of skimmed milk, and declined my offer to lift the lid. It was the only honest box in Merrimack County that year. It said it was full of spirits, and it was.

Then the selectmen posted a guard at Fort Wilkins itself, a big soft Loudon fellow named Hezekiah who used my privy without asking. The privy stood six feet past the end of Barnaby's chain, and that morning I had let the chain out four links. At sundown Hezekiah sat there with his drawers round his ankles and a cold pork pie in his hand. Barnaby has never smelled a pie and not acted on it. He swiped for the pie, missed, and took the seat of the man's drawers and about a dinner-plate of his left cheek. I washed the wound with my hearts and stitched it with boiled horsehair, eleven stitches, like hemming a feed sack. He healed clean, but to this day he sits down in two installments. The guard post moved up the road next morning, and Barnaby got a ham hock.

Brimstone, Snuff, and the Kettle That Crossed Four Times

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister kept my copper tight that summer. The postmaster had him build a box for smoking army letters over burning brimstone for a quarter hour, for fear the sickness rode in on the paper. Sulfur blackens copper in a week and eats any seam not made right, so Silas folded and riveted every corner, hard-brazed the joints with no soft metal anywhere, and flanged the lid to seat like a cork. 'Smoke has to stay where you put it,' he says. The fumes turned one Twelfth New Hampshire man's letter as yellow as a buttercup, and his girl on the Catamount road wailed that he had caught the jaundice. She married him anyway.

He also hammered me a hinged copper case for my scabs, lined with a thin glass cup, because copper and damp make verdigris. Old Deacon Haskell took it for a snuffbox at the Chichester store and had a crust up his nostril before I turned around. A scab up the nose does not vaccinate you. It has to go in through a scratch. The Deacon got nothing out of it but humility, and he was short of that.

Then the pest house sent over its sixty-gallon copper wash kettle to be re-bottomed. Silas painted PEST HOUSE WASH on it, packed in straw and two dozen jars, and topped it with boiled sheets that did not look boiled. It crossed the Barnstead line four times that month and was never once inspected. When he cleaned it for the last time, Silas found eighteen nail scratches under the inner rim where some poor fellow had counted his days. Then the marks stopped. He left them unpolished.

The Run That Washed My Lancets

Nobody had heard of germs, but every army surgeon had seen that a wound washed with strong liquor went bad less often. The hearts did that work. The tails did hardly anything. Drinking it does nothing against the pox, whatever the tavern says.

For a forty-gallon barrel I cook about thirty pounds of cracked corn in near twenty-five gallons of water, stirring so it never sticks. Yeast cannot eat starch, so when the corn has cooled until you can hold a finger in it for a count of two, stir in five or six pounds of ground malted barley. Within an hour or two the paste turns to sweet porridge. Cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, cover it loosely in a warm room with moving air, and let it work four or five days until it is sour and dry. Never ferment in a shut-up pit or closed cellar. The gas will lay a man down for good.

Strip the strained wash fast for cloudy low wines. Then run them again slow on a steady low fire, which lays the run out in order like a deck of cards. The foreshots smell like a hot nail in a paint pot. Catch about a teacup for every five gallons of wash and pour it on the ground, never in a jar. The heads smell of green apples and lamp solvent, so set them aside. The hearts are clean and sweet, proved with a glass hydrometer. The tails turn oily and smell of wet dog and boiled turnips, so save them to run again.

Copper is not for looks. It pulls the sulfur stink out of the vapour, but only where the vapour touches the metal: in the head, the vapour pipe and the worm. Keep it bright by scouring with vinegar and salt, then rinse well. Seal every joint above the liquid line, but never stop the outlet. Silas buried a man out Gilmanton way whose pot burst for that. Never leave a running still unwatched, and keep sand and water by the door.

Oak Shavings, Hickory Ash, and the Blue Flame

From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller writes that his uncle swears by throwing hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg 'to clean out bad heads.' Coopers will not make whiskey barrels of red oak, because it leaks. You can blow smoke clean through a stick of it. Shavings in the doubler give colour and a little woody bite, but they take nothing out. They are paint, not physic. Hickory ash makes lye, which makes soap, and in the keg it leaves only a caustic, gritty mess. The heads come off first, and the only cure is to catch them and pour them out. Your uncle went at it with a broom when he needed a bucket.

During the scare I soaked every coin from across the line overnight in vinegar, as the folk of Eyam did in the plague of 1665, then stamped each one on my anvil. And the blue-flame test is bunk. Good spirit burns pale blue, and so does the killing wood spirit of the foreshots. A blue flame proves your spoon is on fire and nothing more. Trust your nose, your hydrometer and honest cuts.

The roads opened by first frost. Nobody in Pittsfield died of the pox that year, and the chicken-pox soldier married the Tilton girl. Get vaccinated when the doctor comes, leave camphor to the moths, and keep your copper clean and your fire low.