FEATURE STORY
And the bodies all lay
where they fell “A large number of Catholic sisters came to Memphis from St Louis to care for the sick and, of course, the dying.“Among them was a sister
whose home was in Memphis, (her name has since been forgotten) and she had hoped to see them during her stay. “Upon their arrival the nuns were hustled away immediately to begin their work. The unknown sister caught the fever and died six days later — without seeing her family — and perhaps without their even knowing that she had come home.” — Richard Smith, former manager of Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Memphis
Smith was talking about the yellow fever epidemics of 1878 and 1879 (and which were preceded by an earlier one in 1873) that took the lives of 8,000 people, including an unknown number of Catholics. Unlike all the 30,000 citizens of Pompeii – who were buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. – many of these souls’ names ARE known, and thankfully not only to God. Richard Smith is just one of a half-dozen people I interviewed for this piece; and his account of the unknown sister's tragic demise is just one of the many, deeply moving accounts this reporter learned. He was also one of seven local historians and/or archivists who helped write a series 20
of memorial articles, published in the West Tennessee Catholic in 2003 that commemorated the 1878 epidemic's arrival in Memphis. “A lot of incredible stories came out of that project, most of which were not even known to people living at that time,” said Smith. “My time at Calvary spanned 18, perhaps 19 years; I had little knowledge of the epidemics when I first arrived there, until I put together this group of seven people and we began doing research on the 1878 epidemics,” said Smith. “What I also learned about the epidemics during my time at Calvary was that nearly 60 percent of the people who died were Catholic, yet there was no name or date of death recorded,” said Smith.
FAITH West Tennessee | ANNIVERSARY ISSUE 2021 | WWW.CDOM.ORG
BY ROBERT ALAN GLOVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY KAREN PULFER FOCHT
“We are drinking out of the bitter cup of sorrow, and we are doomed.” — editor's comment in The Daily Memphis Avalanche, Friday Aug. 30, 1878.
Carole Bucy is the honorary county historian for Davidson County in the Nashville Diocese. “I teach three sections of Tennessee history at Ball State College, have been there for 26 years and have a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Vanderbilt University,” said Bucy recently. “The epidemics which hit our area in the early 1870s were smaller and caused by cholera and measles,” she said. “We had outbreaks of cholera quite regularly, starting in 1849 and including two more after the Civil War and almost until the 20th century, and a measles epidemic,” said Bucy. And, said Bucy, “While we did have three convents here during the 1870s, our Catholic nuns were not trained as nurses, but heroically went out into the field anyway – to some very poor neighborhoods with unclean drinking water.” When it came to both the West Tennessee outbreaks and those in middle Tennessee,
