David Brook is retired from the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources where he was director of the Division of Historical Resources. He has also written two books on the history of historic preservation in North Carolina.
Before modern vaccines and antibiotics, generations of Americans were routinely plagued by contagions including yellow fever, typhus, measles, and diphtheria. Cholera, however, topped them all in sheer terror. Caused by a bacterium not identified until 1884, cholera is a horrible intestinal disease, spread through contaminated food and water. With a short incubation period, cholera kills through severe dehydration. Untreated victims can die within hours of onset. In the 19th century, crowded immigrant communities were especially hard hit.
The coronavirus pandemic brings to mind the impact of cholera on the life of my great-great grandfather, Ludwig “Louis” Wellendorf (1831-1899). Louis was from Bresewitz, a small town on the Baltic Sea near Rostock, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Germany. According to family lore, he had participated in the failed Revolution of 1848, and fled to Denmark to hide for a time. Continue reading “Cholera, Stormy Seas, and Survival: A Family Story”
It’s not a comfortable time for our country right now. For some reason, perhaps due to our enforced confinement, my husband and I started remembering family stories—our own family histories, good, bad, indifferent. Stories in which personalities peek through the misty past.
I’d love for you to share such stories, those that you like to tell but may not have an audience for, especially if you have exhausted the patience of children and grandchildren. To me these stories bring the past alive. Here are two of mine:
First story:
My great-grandfather’s parents came from Ireland in 1837 and farmed in Ohio. (I always praise the potato because without it they [and thus I] would probably not have been born, and they were lucky to miss the horrible famine of 1847). Their son John was born in 1847 in Ohio. Like many countrymen, the family moved west around 1860. They reached St. Louis, where they were to wait for a boat to take them up the Mississippi to Wisconsin. The family briefly dispersed, with plans to meet at the port. But John, then aged 14, never arrived. Continue reading “You and I Are What History Is About”
Last week I wrote about the Transportation-Communication Revolution that has fostered economic growth around the world.[1] Yes, it may have sped up the international spread of the coronavirus but, if so, that is a short-run effect. Prosperity has been the long-run result.
In the late nineteenth century another transportation-communication revolution took place, as railroads enabled products to be sold over vast geographical distances.[2] In the United States this led to the emergence of mass marketers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, which sent catalogs, products and even kits for building houses all around the country.
