From the Archives: A Pandemic Visits Michigan Tech
By Erik Nordberg, University Archivist Michigan Tech Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
SATC student soldiers drill at the Michigan College of Mines.
Several readers commented on my recent column about former Tech president Fred McNair and my fear that opening a package of photographs might unleash some decades-old flu bug. Well, a recent issue of Popular Science magazine confirms that the Centers for Disease Control have indeed pieced together the genome for the 1918 Spanish influenza virus. With this genetic information, scientists have created a vaccine that they believe could help protect against future strains of influenza, such as the much-touted H5N1 “bird flu.”
Things like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic scare the pants off me. Here was a microscopic virus, which spread unchecked around the world, paying no regard to national boundaries, socioeconomic status, or ethnic background. Conservative estimates identify 20 million known dead from the outbreak, though the true number could be nearer to 100 million deaths around the world.
And it wasn’t just something that happened “over there.” In fact, two men died of Spanish flu in the basement of our current Academic Offices Building.
Influenza wasn’t a new thing in 1918. As it is today, influenza visited most regions of the world each year. But the 1918 strain was particularly virulent, often leading to fatal forms of pneumonia. It made its way across Europe through the spring and summer. More than 30 percent of the Spanish population was sickened with flu—inspiring the nickname for the pandemic to follow.
This early wave of the influenza epidemic was overlooked by many in the medical profession. It was also overshadowed by a larger international issue: World War I. The United States had joined the war in June 1917 and most of the American population had focused its attention on battlefronts, drafts, and wartime industrial production.
On October 15, the US Public Health Service began a nationwide educational campaign about influenza. “The disease now spreading over this country is highly catching and may invade your community and attack you and your family unless you are very careful.”
It was the war—and the movement of troops—which would provide the horrible conduit bringing Spanish influenza to North America. As historian Alfred Crosby noted: “At the end of the last summer of World War I, some 1.5 million American adults who were most perfectly qualified to cultivate the most dangerously virulent strain of influenza virus in history — were stationed in a small number of military camps all over the nation — with large numbers of them constantly traveling back and forth between these camps.”
One of those camps was located in Houghton, Michigan.
By summer 1918, the Students’ Army Training Corps (SATC) was established at the Michigan College of Mines. Two sections of soldiers comprised the Houghton unit: the “collegiate section,” followed a more-traditional mining and metallurgy curriculum and allowed soldiers to complete full degrees, while the “vocation sections” brought army draftees for eight-week courses in drilling and blasting. Each of the vocational detachments included roughly two hundred men, drawn from around the Great Lakes region.
Meanwhile, the first indications of the impending epidemic started to turn up on the eastern seaboard. The US Naval Hospital at Chelsea, Massachusetts, recorded the first identified case of Spanish influenza on August 28. By September 1918, an estimated 85,000 citizens of Massachusetts were reported sick and a military intake draft was canceled as virtually every army camp to which recruits would report was under quarantine.
Although attempts were made to limit military travel between army and navy stations, influenza began to spread inland. On September 11, the first flu appeared at Great Lakes Training Station near Chicago. The first cases appeared in Michigan by the end of September.
The flu began to reach the Copper Country. Local men who had joined the armed forces were shipped to crowded training camps, many of which became influenza breeding grounds. In October, newspapers reported the influenza deaths of two local men stationed in Battle Creek, and the College of Mines heard from Camp Grant near Rockford, Illinois, of the death of Sgt. Martin Sather, a popular graduate of the first vocational section to train with the Houghton SATC. The death of another local man was reported from the Great Lakes Training Station.
A Red Cross hospital was established in the basement of the Library and Administration Building to care for the most serious influenza and pneumonia cases.
As alarming as these announcements were, the army continued with its plans for training recruits at the college. A farewell dance was held October 10 for the second vocational detachment and plans were underway for the arrival of a third detachment. The incoming recruits—266 in total—were given instructions to follow basic quarantine procedures on their journey to the Copper Country, remaining onboard at station stops along their train routes and reducing their interactions with others as much as possible.
Some communities chose to voluntarily close churches, schools, and theaters as reports of local influenza cases began to mount. The Michigan Department of Health finally issued a statewide order prohibiting most forms of public gatherings. The ban would remain in force through the middle of November. The third detachment of SATC trainee soldiers arrived in Houghton just as the closure notices came into force. They also brought Spanish influenza with them.
The October 22 edition of the Daily Mining Gazette reported “Twenty-two Cases of Influenza at College.” Steps were immediately taken to contain the spread of the virus. Confirmed cases were isolated in a makeshift Red Cross hospital in the basement of the Library and Administration Building (now known as the Academic Offices Building).
The members of the local Red Cross proved very resourceful in responding to their patients’ needs. They procured gauze masks to be worn by the suspected cases. When the active cases developed and it was decided that all beds in the quarters of the men should be provided with gauze curtains, local volunteers produced a total of 325 such curtains.
In all, sixty-two cases of influenza were reported among the soldiers of the SATC. “On the whole the officers consider that the outlook at the college is not serious,” reported the Gazette.
The gymnasium of the Club House Building (the current ROTC building) was transformed into a convalescent ward for less-serious cases.
Rather than anxious about illness, however, most people appeared disturbed by the disruption in use of the gym. The Gazette lamented: “There will be no more games nor dances on the polished floor for some time. There was a bright prospect for basketball and other indoor athletics last week, but the epidemic has caused postponement.”
Newly arrived SATC student soldiers line up to be divided into squads.
Officials continued to downplay the severity of the outbreak at the College. Headlines of “Influenza at College of Mines is Checked” and “Influenza Spread Stops at College of Mines” were repeated in many local newspapers. “The influenza epidemic at the College of Mines is past” was the report on October 27. “No deaths resulted and on the whole the experience terminates most gratifyingly to the officers, the college authorities and the men.”
Such optimism proved premature for the few patients whose influenza had turned to pneumonia. On October 31, twenty-one-year-old Pvt. George W. Prins of downstate Holland died in the camp hospital from complications of influenza and pneumonia. The Gazette reported that Prins was ill on his arrival and was ordered to the hospital as one of the first influenza patients. “Enroute to Houghton,” the Gazette claimed, “the train on which Prins was a passenger stopped in Grand Rapids during a rain storm. He exposed himself in the rain and thereby contracted a cold that made him easily susceptible to influenza when it appeared in camp.”
One day later, twenty-four-year-old Pvt. Burr Schmalzreid of Levering, Michigan, became the second victim of the influenza epidemic. Schmalzreid was taken ill with influenza only a week before his death and died only twenty-four hours after the diagnosis of pneumonia. Schmalzreid’s parents arrived at the college just minutes after their son’s death.
Officers quickly tightened their quarantine restrictions, and no other deaths followed. At least two additional pneumonia patients survived their illness and the less-serious influenza patients were released from isolation.
On November 11, a general armistice was signed. This not only ended the war in Europe, but also signaled the end of the SATC at Tech. By mid-December, all of the surviving student-soldiers were demobilized—most leaving Houghton “with sore arms from a shot of the new influenza virus developed by the Mayo Brothers in Rochester, Minnesota.”
Officials heralded the low mortality rate at the college (one half of one percent) as one of the lowest for SATC programs. Rates at other institutions in the Midwest were as high as seven percent.
Over the course of the Spanish influenza epidemic, more than 25 percent of the US population became sick, 2.5 percent of influenza patients eventually dying. If such a plague killed a similar fraction of the US population today, more than 1.5 million Americans would die.
I’d suggest we show caution in any excavations involving the basement of the Academic Office Building.