Pox (9 page)

In 1886, a Scottish-born Canadian named Alexander Arthur prospected the area for a railroad company and found the place rich in hardwoods, iron ore, and coal. A distant relative of former president Chester A. Arthur, Alexander Arthur fit the type of the mutton-chop-wearing, fast-talking capitalist who earned the Gilded Age its name. With capital from New York and North Carolina, he started buying up options to the land. He then approached investors in London and sold them on the idea that Yellow Creek Valley had the makings of a great iron and steel manufacturing center, a place where surplus British capital could be brought to bear upon untapped American natural resources to generate extraordinary wealth. Arthur had arrived in London at an opportune moment, the very peak of British investment in U.S. enterprises. The economic potential of such boom-towns had already been demonstrated elsewhere in the “New South,” most notably in the coalfields and steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama, established in 1871. With Arthur running the U.S. side of the operation, the London investors incorporated in 1887 under English law as the American Association, Ltd. The association secured title from the mountain people to eighty thousand acres of land. A separate Arthur entity, the Middlesborough Town Company, launched construction of the physical city, named after the iron center in northern England. A local postmaster, as if to announce the presence of federal authority in this new community, lopped off the last three letters. Arthur's secretary later told the tale of Middlesboro's birth in terms not far from the mark: “[A]lmost a hundred years after England lost her colonies, ‘conquistadores' from Albion came out to a still crude and unsettled quarter of the United States for the purpose of further colonization.”
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By 1890, twenty million dollars' worth of British capital and the muscle of thousands of American and European workers had turned Yellow Creek Valley into a boomtown of five thousand people. Railroad workers dug a tunnel under the Gap, connecting Middlesboro to Tennessee and the markets and ports of the southeastern United States. A rail beltway circled the town, with spurs shooting off to the hillside collieries that various companies operated under leases from the Association. The Appalachian skies grew thick with the smoke and smells of ironworks, blast furnaces, tanneries, sawmills, brickyards, and breweries. The early encampment of tents gave way to a well-ordered grid of wide streets filled with streetcars, stores, saloons, hotels, banks, schools, churches, sturdy wooden houses for the workers, and stone Victorians for their bosses. Middlesboro even boasted an opera house and one of America's first golf courses. And the American Association and its distant investors controlled it all.
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The bust came as swiftly as the boom. In the spring of 1890, a fire leveled the Middlesboro business district. The buildings were quickly rebuilt, but at great expense to the Association and the local government it controlled. Later that year, the Bank of Baring Brothers in London declared bankruptcy, taking many of Middlesboro's British investors down with it. As the town's sources of capital dried up, the realization dawned that the area's reserves of commercial grade iron ore were thinner than expected. Then came the American financial panic of 1893. All four of the town's banks failed. Merchants closed their stores. Employers laid off workers. People drained out of the place. The Association mortgaged seventy thousand acres of land to a New York bank for $1.5 million and then, in October 1893, declared bankruptcy. And yet, Middlesboro survived. With its rail connections, its coal reserves, its furnaces, and its hungry labor force, the city still had the stuff of a scaled-down industrial city where profits could be made. In 1894, a federal court ordered a public auction of the mortgaged acres. A new company, incorporated under U.S. law, snapped up the land for a mere $15,000. The company's name had a familiar ring: American Association, Inc. Its roster of investors looked familiar, too. They were mostly the same London capitalists who once called themselves American Association, Ltd.
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Middlesboro shed its most grandiose aspirations (along with most of its wealthier residents) and settled down to the hardscrabble life of an Appalachian company town. The place more closely resembled a remote settlement of impoverished wage earners than a conventional urban or rural place. The local government carried a heavy debt; without a penny in the treasury, the city routinely paid its schoolteachers and other employees in devalued city scrip. The rest of Middlesboro's breadwinners, with the exception of the factory superintendents and a small professional class, scratched out a living where they could, doing day labor and working for the mines, works, and factories that still operated. European immigrants had helped build Middlesboro, but almost everyone who stayed was a southern-born American. More than one fifth of the city's 3,500 residents were African American.

Middlesboro heeded southern racial norms, with segregated schools and much of the black population consigned to work in the meanest jobs and to live in the thickly settled sections known as “Alabama Row” and “Over the Rhine.” (The latter name recalled a defunct German brewery that had once perfumed the area with the sweet stench of hops.) In the fall of 1897, the everyday life of Middlesboro was tied more closely than ever to the furnaces and the mines that fed them. In mid-November, the local newspapers buzzed with the first really good news that anyone had heard in a long time. The Ducktown iron mines over Cumberland Mountain were set to reopen. Soon trains would carry ten cars a day loaded with ore to Middlesboro. The furnaces would run at full blast again: “Prosperity is certainly coming to this section,” the
Middlesboro Weekly Herald
promised.
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Prosperity never came. Smallpox did.

It started in the Over the Rhine section. In late October, an African American miner named Scott had left the smallpox-infested coal camps around Birmingham and traveled more than three hundred miles for a new job in the Mingo Mines, located just across the border from Middlesboro in Tennessee. He found housing in the Over the Rhine section. Scott was a member of a fast-growing occupation. The number of black miners and quarrymen in the United States doubled during the 1890s. Like the vast majority of African Americans (roughly 90 percent), most of them lived in the southern states. And like roughly one third of all African American breadwinners at the end of the nineteenth century, they worked at least part of the year in nonagricultural occupations, often in rural industries such as mining, turpentine production, and lumbering. The age of Carnegie generated enormous demand for coal. And the rapidly expanding southern railroad network brought southern coal reserves within easier reach of the national market. In southern Appalachia, the coal-rich region stretching from central Alabama to West Virginia, one third of all miners were African American. The work was dirty and dangerous, the jobs mostly nonunion, the bosses white. Typically the first let go when business slowed, a black miner like Scott had to be ready to move.
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Although he had no way of knowing it, he carried a bit of Birmingham with him when he did. A Marine-Hospital Service surgeon stationed in Birmingham during the smallpox epidemics of 1897–98 described black miners as “the great disseminators of infection. Essentially itinerant, they travel from mining camp to mining camp, from town to town, carrying the disease with them.” About a week after his arrival at Mingo, Scott came down with a fever and chills. A week later came the eruption. Someone called for a doctor.
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On November 14, a white Middlesboro physician named Dr. F. P. Kenyon examined Scott. He found the miner lying ill in a building in Over the Rhine. Located across the tracks and the lazy Yellow Creek from the heart of Middlesboro, the section was notorious for its rowdy saloons and bawdy houses where whites and blacks mixed. The building where Scott lay had once housed John Hughes's saloon, remembered locally, in the words of a white newspaperman, as “the scene of many a bloody coon scrap.” Dr. Kenyon recognized Scott's condition, but just to make sure he called in a second physician, who confirmed his diagnosis: a “well developed case of smallpox.”
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That simple act of naming Scott's condition brought the miner and the physicians into the orbit of the law. A Kentucky statute required all physicians and heads of household to report any contagious and infectious diseases to their local board of health. In most communities in this predominantly rural state, “local” meant the county. But under state law, a city of Middlesboro's size (more than 2,500 residents) was supposed to have a board of health and a health officer of its own. Middlesboro had no hospital in 1898, let alone a functioning board of health. But two of the three members of the Bell County Board of Health, Dr. T. H. Curd and Dr. L. L. Robertson, lived in the city, and they, too, confirmed the diagnosis, estimating that roughly fifteen people had come into contact with Scott. That night, residents clustered in the streets to discuss the rumored outbreak, the latest insult in a long run of bad luck. Some said it was time to leave Middlesboro for good. Meeting in an emergency session, the city council ordered the police to enforce a quarantine against the Over the Rhine district. Priding itself on its healthy mountain air, Middlesboro had no pesthouse. Scott and several African American residents known to have been exposed to him were placed under guard in the old Hughes saloon.
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Politically, the city council's strategy for thwarting a smallpox epidemic had two things going for it: it didn't inconvenience the white citizenry much, and it was cheap. Kentucky law held local governments liable for the cost of managing an epidemic. In a legal case arising from the Bardstown smallpox outbreak of 1883, a Kentucky court noted that this obligation went further than “the ordinary social duty to care for the helpless.” “If the poor man is neglected he may starve or freeze, but the calamity is personal, and his grave hides it; but if, having an infectious disease, which poisons the air, he is left where he lies, the entire community is menaced.” Whether this fiscal responsibility properly fell on Middlesboro, Bell County, or both would become a heated issue. For now, the city council decided that local police, already on the payroll, would enforce the quarantine. A more aggressive approach—a targeted quarantine and a well-run pesthouse coupled with compulsory vaccination of the entire population—would have been much more expensive. A pesthouse cost money: fees for the physician, wages for the guards, and food for the indigent patients. A general vaccination order posed other problems.
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Vaccination was not popular in Kentucky. Although state board of health rules required that public schoolchildren submit to vaccination, the board estimated that at least one third of the state's white residents and a larger part of its African Americans had never been vaccinated. In Middlesboro, according to one estimate, nine tenths of the population had never undergone the procedure. And when a local government ordered a general vaccination, it was liable under state law for the cost of providing vaccination free to the poor. In a place as impoverished as Middlesboro, that meant paying a lot of doctor's fees and buying a lot of vaccine.
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Another factor weighed into the political calculus. A good many Middlesboro residents, including the editors of the local newspapers, greeted the news of a smallpox outbreak with skepticism. The
Weekly Herald
described Scott's illness as “a malady something like smallpox.” Scott had a relatively mild case, and it may have looked just like chicken pox to the few people who got a look at him. Economic self-interest and civic pride strengthened medical doubts. To call the “malady” smallpox would threaten the reputation and livelihood of Middlesboro. The city council of neighboring Pineville, the county seat, had already ordered a quarantine against Middlesboro, forbidding anyone from the mountain city to enter the town. The Middlesboro newspapers, which agreed on little else, warned citizens not to spread “wild exaggerated reports” that might lead other towns to choke off the flow of people and goods to and from Middlesboro. In Middlesboro's straits, the spread of rumors seemed more dangerous than the spread of smallpox itself.
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And then the smallpox “scare” ended. Scott recovered. No new cases had come to light. On December 9, the city council declared victory and lifted the quarantine. And so, as life returned to normal in Middlesboro, the population remained almost entirely unvaccinated.
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Weeks passed before the white officials of Middlesboro realized their quarantine had failed. A smallpox outbreak often begins slowly. Due to variola's long incubation period, two weeks may pass between the initial discovery of a single smallpox case and the appearance of the next cluster, or “generation,” of cases. The medical logic of the quarantine is that by waiting out the incubation period, keeping potential carriers—“suspects”—apart from everyone else, officials can contain an outbreak and eventually snuff it out. But for those who must live on the other side of the quarantine line, the medical rationale is not always its most salient feature. When Pineville had announced its quarantine against the entire city of Middlesboro, city leaders had cried foul. The historical record mentions no such public outcry from the African American residents of Middlesboro's own quarantined district, who were confined to a territory ostensibly justified by the public health but drawn explicitly by race. But the unanticipated consequence of this policy was that African Americans in the district did not notify the white authorities when more people in their community broke out with smallpox.
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This failure or outright refusal to cooperate with the local white power structure had its own unintended political effect. For when the authorities realized that smallpox had spread in the Over the Rhine section, the discovery merely reinforced their belief in the legitimacy of their quarantine. The
Middlesboro Weekly Record
ran a series of satirical dialect pieces that purported to represent the “niggahs' ” point of view on the smallpox situation. In one piece, an old “aunt” tells a reporter that the only way to stop “dem low down niggahs from spreading smallpox is for de perlice” to “scrub that'ol Alabama dirt . . . off'n 'em.”
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