Norfolk’s Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1855

Summer 2005 Courier

Norfolk’s Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1855

By Peggy Haile McPhillips

July 2005 marks the 150th anniversary of the yellow fever epidemic of
1855, one of the great tragedies in Norfolk and Portsmouth history.

Norfolk waterfront c. 1857, Courtesy of Norfolk Public Library

View of the Harbor of Portsmouth, 1843 Engraving by J. O. Montalant, published in 1845 in Historical Collections of Virginia, by Henry Howe. Publisher: Wm. R. Babcock, Charleston, SC , 1856.

On June 7, 1855, the steamer Ben Franklin arrived in Hampton Roads from the Virgin Islands, where yellow fever was rampant. Two crewmen had died of the fever along the way. The steamer lay in quarantine for twelve days before going to a Gosport shipyard for repairs, under orders that her bilges not be pumped out, orders that the Captain disobeyed. Another crew member came down with the fever on June 21 and died the next day. A fourth man died on July 8th. After the disease spread along Irish Row, a tenement on the Portsmouth waterfront, those residents evacuated to Barry’s Row in Norfolk. Yellow fever was epidemic there by early August. The homes and all their contents on Barry’s Row were burned to the ground on the night of August 9, a futile attempt to curb the spread of yellow fever.

The Rev. George D Armstrong (1813-1899) Armstrong was pastor of Norfolk’s Presbyterian Church in 1855. He helped to nurse many Norfolk citizens through the 1855 epidemic. He shares a detailed first-hand account in Summer of the Pestilence, published in the latter part of 1855.

Citizens fled both cities in panic. At Old Point, they were turned away by soldiers with bayonets. Other cities enforced quarantine or imposed fines. But some doors remained open, notably those in Richmond, Mathews County and Fredericksburg, and on the Eastern Shore. Governor-elect Henry Wise took refugees into his own home and set up tents on the lawn for the overflow.

By August, businesses and offices had closed. Church services were suspended. Doctors and nurses came from around the country to offer their services, many falling prey to the disease. When the Sisters of Charity came down from Maryland aboard the Old Bay Line, Anne Herron invited them into her large home on Church Street to tend yellow fever victims. It was Norfolk’s first public hospital and the forerunner of today’s Bon Secours DePaul. Miss Herron, who died of the fever in September 1855, left her home and estate to the Sisters of Charity to carry on their work in Norfolk. At peak around the first of September, as many as 80 people died per day – with 400 burials in the first week of the month. In all, there were an estimated 1,000 deaths in Portsmouth and 2,000 in Norfolk, about a third of those who did not flee.

Stone marking the graves of the Sisters of Charity at St. Mary’s Cemetery. One of them, Sr. Christine Ryan, died in the Norfolk yellow fever epidemic of 1855. Photograph courtesy of Donna Bluemink.

The Richmond Daily Dispatch attempted to frame the significance of the numbers in an article published on October 4, 1855: “Some idea of the destructiveness of the pestilence in Norfolk may be formed from comparing it with the great Plague in London. In that plague, one in seventeen died; in Norfolk, one in three. In fact, we know of no pestilence which has ever visited any part of the world, equal in destruction to that which has desolated the City of Norfolk.”

The fever abated after the first frost in October, and the editor of Norfolk’s Southern Argus newspaper wrote “In the short space of ninety days, out of an average population of 6,000, every man, woman and child, almost without exception, has been stricken … and about 2,000 have been buried. But the storm is over, and again our good ship lays her course...her flag…sadly at half mast.”

Anne Plume Behan Herron’s marker in St. Mary’s Cemetery was erected by her brother. It reads:

A brother to a devoted sister Anne P. B. Herron A native of Ireland Died 27th Sept. 1855
Requiescat in pace.

Behan was Anne’s birth name. She and her brother were adopted as children by their uncle, Walter B. Herron.

Photograph courtesy of Donna Bluemink .

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