The second wave of Spanish Flu hit Adams County particularly hard in the Fairfield area and the eastern part of the county. One doctor was quoted in the Star and Sentinel as saying, “I have just come from four homes. Three or four people were sick in every one of them. One of the families had both parents and the two children ill. I have another family in which there were six cases.”
Reports said the second outbreak wasn’t as pervasive, but it could still be deadly. This is typical of locations where there was a second outbreak. I have a theory about that. In the early part of 1918, the world experienced a typical flu outbreak. It wasn’t deadly, but what was discovered by researchers was that people who had that flu fared much better during the Spanish Flu outbreak in the fall than those who didn’t catch the spring flu. This is because the spring flu caused those people to develop antibodies that helped them fight off the Spanish Flu.
Adams County moved into the 1918 Christmas season cautiously. Dr. B. F. Royer told the Gettysburg Times, “With the approach of the holiday season too much stress cannot be laid on the necessity of avoiding crowding in the stores, many of which are poorly ventilated.”
People were urged to do their shopping early when fewer people would be in the stores.
In another double death, the Compiler reported that the Stoner died within 24 hours of each other. They were farmers who had been married for two years and were both in their mid-20s.
The Gettysburg Times reported that Charles Walter who had been sick for 2 weeks with the flu died on January 2 at home of his parents just before they had to leave for the funeral of their daughter who had died earlier from flu.
The Gettysburg Times reported another unusual case associated with Spanish Flu. A man named Roy Dice said he caught the flu, survived and Dr. Swan told him he could start sitting up. He began to feel pains in his leg. It quickly swelled up and turned blue. Then gangrene set in and he would up having to have his leg amputated.
Christmas 1918 was somber. A lot of people had lost someone they knew to the flu. Church Christmas programs were cancelled for fear of having too many people in a confined space.
The Star and Sentinel reported on January 18 that 160 soldiers had died from the flu, most of them at Camp Colt and 19 civilians in Gettysburg and 4 in Cumberland, Straban, Freedom, Highland. This is incorrect simply from browsing of the obituaries. Not knowing the source of their numbers, I suspect that it may be only people who listed the flu as the cause of death, but pneumonia deaths were from the flu, too. Pneumonia is what the flu developed into.
Even with these numbers, Gettysburg’s population was 4600 at the time. This represents roughly 4 percent of the population dying.
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