The Fever Year, 1867

The first confirmed death was a man named Sayers, on 27 August 1867. By November yellow fever had killed two hundred and three people in La Grange, out of a town of roughly a thousand. The dead were counted in the categories of the period: a hundred and twelve foreign born, seventy Americans, twenty one Black. Coffins ran out and the bodies went into rough wooden boxes, then stood in piles inside the cemetery fence waiting for ground, and were finally buried six and seven to a grave. Nobody knew what caused it. Blame settled on a travelling peddler, and on a box of books shipped up from New Orleans. Judge Livingston Lindsay wrote to Governor E. M. Pease on 9 October, counting a hundred and seventy deaths in a little over four weeks out of a population he put at no more than sixteen hundred, and reporting that more than half of the people, he believed as many as two thirds, had fled their homes. Three new cases had appeared in his own family in thirty six hours. The New Orleans Crescent, writing in late September, described barely five hundred citizens remaining, as many as twenty four burials in two days, the newspapers stopped, the jail emptied out, and by the ninth of the month not even corn meal left in town to make gruel. The mass graves are believed to lie in the northeastern corner of the old city cemetery. They went unmarked for a hundred and fifty years, and the marker over them was dedicated in October 2017.