Historian Maggie Bartley speaks to a gathering at the Keene Valley Library about the Spanish Flu.
Photo by Tim Rowland
KEENE VALLEY | In March of 1920, the spunky and adventuresome silent film star Pearl White was in the village of Port Henry shooting a picture about Alaska.
While there, she got wind of a crisis roiling the hills and hollows 30 miles to the west in the Keene and AuSable valleys where high percentages of the population were being felled by a deadly flu bug that had stricken the nation over the past two years.
So, lacking any other obvious transportation, according to newspaper accounts, she commandeered a dog team from the movie set and mushed a sled load of “food, medicine and delicacies” to the wilderness outpost, where she became an instant heroine. It was an exploit that perfectly matched her onscreen persona. Too perfectly, it turned out.
New Russia historian Maggie Bartley thought this was a tremendous story — until she started thinking about the distance and terrain between Port Henry and Keene.
“I thought wait, there’s something wrong here,” she said. “And how much can you carry on dog sled anyway?”
Her instincts proved correct. A little digging provided follow-up coverage proclaiming that the heroic rescue was a hoax cooked up by an over-imaginative publicity firm and willingly disseminated by a gullible press.
But if the story of a frozen Florence Nightingale were fake news, the terror of the influenza in the Adirondacks was not.
Speaking to a gathering at the Keene Valley Library last week, Bartley said the flu swept the nation in late 1918, then rebounded with a particular fury in Keene and AuSable Forks early in 1920.
The pandemic, popularly known as the Spanish Flu, infected 500 million people around the world and killed between 50 million and 100 million people, or as much as 5 percent of the planet’s population.
The aggressive H1N1 virus was particularly deadly among people in their 20s, likely due to fierce reactions of their immune systems, which rattled their systems with deadly force. Paradoxically, infants and the elderly — those with weaker immune systems — were generally spared.
Of the 45 young men from Essex County who lost their lives in World War I, 20 died of the flu, Bartley said. There was the handsome young recruit from Ticonderoga who died when he arrived at the Army base in Boston. There was the “classy outfielder” John McDonald from Port Henry who suffered the same fate. “Most died before they even got on the boat,” Bartley said.
Nor were the Adirondack mountains themselves much of a defense. One family in Saranac Lake lost four members in five days, with others infected and three more not expected to make it, the papers reported.
Medical care at the time was notoriously sketchy. As the flu caught hold, one Keene doctor seems to have decided that it was a perfect time to retire to a remote camp on a secluded lake. Keene Valley was fortunate to have something of a rudimentary hospital known as the Neighborhood House, but it was the exception. Even the Champlain Valley Hospital in Plattsburgh would not be built until 1923, as communities responded to the pandemic by going on a hospital-building tear.
Desperate calls went out for nurses, but there were few to be found. And even those who administered to the sick could offer little in the way of relief.
The masks that were ubiquitously worn were ineffective against the virus, which Bartley said could sail through gauze as if it were chicken wire. Drug stores tried to capitalize with products made from bark, white pine tar and wild cherry sap, with the obligatory dose of alcohol and morphine thrown in for good measure.
“Get rid of the cough before it gets rid of you,” read one ad in the Ticonderoga Sentinel.
Government edicts, posted in towns and in the papers, were almost comical in retrospect, as they advised people to sleep with their windows open, get good exercise and refrain from spitting. One public placard advised, “No loitering, finish your business and go home.”
Bartley said the initial outbreak hit Port Henry hard, with its tightly packed population of miners. Town records show six deaths from the flu in 1917 and three in 1919 — but 27 deaths in 1918, with the average age of the victim being 29.
But it was two years later, when the risk appeared to be gone, that it hit Keene Valley, Wilmington and AuSable Forks with such a vengeance that gravediggers struggled to keep up with the demand.
One Albany nurse was dispatched to Keene by train, catching a sleigh ride for the last leg of the journey from Lake Placid with a driver who was delivering a load of coffins, and drinking precipitously.
Ninety percent of the 400 people in the valley were infected, a rate so pervasive that when the nurse arrived she was handed an armload of medicine and simply told to go door to door.
By March of 1920, when Pearl White made her famous “ride to the rescue,” the crisis had passed. To the actress’ credit, she did actually wire the supervisor asking if there were anything she could do, to which he basically replied, “No, we’re good.”
