LESSONS OF HISTORY:
Concord & the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
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A week before Thanksgiving 1917, the Concord Enterprise printed a letter from a young Maynard man named Hugh Connors. The United States had entered the First World War seven months earlier, and Connors had shipped out with New England Sawmill Unit No. 3, a team of American lumbermen stationed in Scotland.1 “I am writing this letter in bed,” he wrote, “as I have been laid up for a week with the grippe. Over here they call it influenza,” he added, as if translating a foreign word. “I am not at the hospital, but have engaged a room about five minutes’ ride by bicycle, from our camp.”2
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Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2020
Red Cross volunteers assemble gauze masks at Fort Devens, Devens, MA
He didn’t seem too worried about his illness. His bunkmates, felling trees to supply lumber for the war effort, probably mocked him as he pedaled off to his cozy sickbed. Friends and family back home never suspected that this might be their first warning of an imminent global tragedy. The first wave of the influenza pandemic took its heaviest toll among the oldest and youngest populations. Fit young adults like Hugh Connors often recovered quickly. Americans knew little about the disease, because wartime censorship kept the European press from reporting on it. Spain
remained neutral, so the Spanish press were free to document the outbreak, leading many to refer to it as “Spanish flu.” In March 1918, a case of influenza was reported at Fort Riley in Kansas, and quickly spread as soldiers were moved from base to base. In the late summer, a more lethal strain of the flu emerged, and Concord found itself dead center between two of the U.S. hot spots, less than 20 miles from both Boston Navy Yard and Camp Devens. On September 20, a soldier at Devens died “after but a few hours’ illness [of the] influenza now so prevalent among both soldiers and civilians.”
Public domain
BY VICTOR CURRAN
