The cholera first appeared on May 6, 1873, inside the city prison. Prisoners had just returned from railroad work in West Tennessee, carrying the disease with them. The first death outside the prison walls came on May 25.
By summer’s end, roughly a thousand people were dead. Nashville’s population was 25,865. That’s one in every twenty-five.
The disease struck hardest in the neighborhoods of the poor. Between June 7 and July 1 alone, the city recorded 403 deaths among Black Nashvillians and 244 among whites. Entire families were destroyed. In one household, a father, mother, and six children — all industrious people, all dead within weeks, except the mother, who was left prostrated and alone. In another, a carpenter died within hours, his eldest daughter followed, two younger children hovered between life and death for days, and only one daughter — a delicate girl — was left standing, threatened with the disease herself, at times without a morsel of food in the house.
Among the Black community, the scenes were worse. One family of seven — a father, mother, married son, his wife and infant, and two small children — saw the father, son, and son’s wife die. The wife’s body lay uncoffined in the small room with three other sick people from Friday night to Monday morning. No one was well enough to go report the death. A cholera corpse in a small room in the June heat for three days.
The rich fled. They loaded their families onto carriages and rode out of the city to summer homes and resorts, leaving their poor neighbors to die. This enraged David Lipscomb, the Nashville preacher and editor of the Gospel Advocate, who stayed in the city and drove his buggy through the worst neighborhoods carrying Catholic Sisters of Mercy and Dominican nuns to the sick. He wrote furiously in July 1873:
“Christian men and women should be prudent, and cautious in such surroundings. But for able bodied Christian men and women to be flying from the city when their brethren and neighbors and fellow-creatures are suffering and dying for lack of attention and help, is such a contradiction in ideas, we know of no means of reconciling them.”
He estimated that if half the time and money the wealthy spent fleeing had been spent caring for their neighbors — furnishing them with food and medicine — “the disease might have been arrested almost in its incipiency.”
An anonymous letter-writer accused Lipscomb of self-righteousness. Lipscomb published the letter alongside his own reply, which is one of the finest pieces of Nashville rhetoric ever committed to paper: “Ah, my brother, you feel badly over your course. I know you do. I am glad of it. I am in hopes you will feel worse and worse until you determine you will never do so again.”
The epidemic forced two changes on Nashville.
The first was infrastructure. The city established a permanent Board of Health and began overhauling its water and sewer systems. The contaminated springs and shared privies that had spread the disease through low-lying neighborhoods would eventually be replaced. Five years later, an island filtering gallery was installed to reduce waterborne bacteria. Sixteen years later, the Eighth Avenue Reservoir was built. The city’s relationship with its own water supply — from Fort Nashboro’s spring to the cholera gutters to the reservoir that would later collapse — is one long reckoning with this summer.
The second was the children.
The cholera left hundreds of orphans — children whose parents had died in the epidemic, with no family to take them in and no system to catch them. Judge John C. Ferris saw what happened to these children and spent the next twelve years of his life building a solution. In 1885, with funding from railroad tycoon King Cole and his wife Anna Russell Cole, the Randall Cole Industrial School opened on 92 acres off Murfreesboro Road. It would become the Tennessee Industrial School, then the Tennessee Preparatory School, and would operate for 117 years.
A thousand dead in one summer. A city that ran away from itself and then had to come back and build something better. The orphans of the cholera didn’t choose Nashville. Nashville had to choose them.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons