Look Back: How it was with small pox in 1903
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Editor Sentinel: Dear Sir, In the summer of 1903 when I was six, our family had small pox. Compared to what actually happened to us, physically and emotionally, that little account in a recent Sunday News sounds like Sesame Street.
We lived on the south side of 9 1/2 street [in Parkersburg] in a three-story house and Mama kept board and roomers, mostly young men attending Mr. Sine's Business College. Papa worked as a teamster in Pittsburgh. He never saw the man who gave him the disease, but recalled later that a tramp had bedded down with his horses and left his dirty clothes in a stall and that he had removed them with a pitchfork to the dump.
When Papa arrived home a very sick man, Mama put him to bed and called Dr. Harry Campbell, who came and took one look and left hurriedly, white as a sheet. Very soon thereafter the Health Officer came to vaccinate us.
Uncle Perry Dye, whose home was in Elizabeth, had come down to work for Wells Fargo Express and was staying with us. At that time his wife and two small daughters had come to visit. To compound the situation, our visitors had a visitor, Miss Fannie Clelland, and she was right there in plain view when the health officer arrived with his needle which he used on all of us on the front porch.
Next, he nailed a yellow flag to our front gate. Right away, a nasty, hateful, ugly man (I'm quoting my mother) installed himself on a kitchen chair outside our gate and sat there for the duration...more about him later. Thank God we had a nice night guard, Okey McLaughlin's brother, without whom we would have starved.
On the lower end of our back yard was a nice big chicken house. The Dyes and Miss Clelland moved in and lived there for the incubation period. There was a chicken wire fence half-way around our yard. Heloise and I sat in our little chairs on either side [of the fence], playing missus and having lots of fun, paying no mind to the threats of the guard. My only other playmate was a big old gray tom cat. I could pick him up by the tail and swing him around by the tail and he enjoyed it. He hated the guard. The guard would scream threats at him, and he would fly at the man, teeth and claws bared, miss him by inches, and walk off down the street, tail in the air, unconcerned as if the man didn't exist.
Between the cat and my mother, it's a wonder the man didn't have a stroke. There was always a battle which didn't stop until Mama got too sick to argue. He was supposed to bring us groceries, but all we got from him was stale bread, soup beans and water. He never knew that after dark Grandma Betty [Roberts] carried to the corner of the yard a big basket of farm groceries.
Finally, the day came when the chicken house residents had served their time, and they were free to leave. They went out the back gate, down the alley, and walked out Seventh street to the City Park where they could rest until time for the afternoon train to Elizabeth. Fan Clelland said, "I'm sorry folks, but I'll have to go back, I'm sick." This time she came into the house. Not being as bad off as Mama, she helped nurse my father and little sister who were seriously ill.
When D-day came, we were fumigated, scrubbed all over with some vile smelling stuff, dressed in some awful clothes brought by the Health Department, and told to stand on the front porch until the health officer came to release us. They knew the only place we would be welcome was the farm at Sandy Bend [on the Little Kanawha River, south of Elizabeth].
All our furniture was burned in a bonfire in the front yard. The only thing they left was the kitchen stove. Papa's paper money had been spread out on the oven door with the door wide open. When we went back to the house two months later, the money was still there.
Sincerely, Lohr Chinn
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Bob Enoch is president of the Wood County Historical and Preservation Society. If you have comments or questions about Look Back items, please contact him at: roberteenoch@gmail.com, or by mail at WCHPS, PO Box 565, Parkersburg, WV 26102.