History shows that several pandemics have struck in New York State – one of the less remembered is known as the Second Cholera Pandemic of 1832.
New York was among the most thoroughly scourged among the states.
A person may get cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium. Although cholera can be acquired from under-cooked marine life, in an epidemic, the source of the contamination is usually the feces of an infected person. The disease can spread rapidly in areas with inadequate treatment of sewage and drinking water and New York City, Buffalo, and Utica were all hit particularly hard due to the bacterium‘s water borne mobility.
Virtually every city along the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers, Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Champlain, and the Erie Canal suffered despite the imposition of quarantines and frantic local efforts to “purify” and eliminate public health nuisances. In June 1832 cholera appeared in Quebec and Montreal and then in Prescott, Kingston, and York in Canada.
Thriving towns along the Erie Canal suffered as well as small villages and even isolated farms. The appearance of cholera was the signal for the general exodus of inhabitants of larger communities, who, in their headlong flight, spread the disease throughout the surrounding countryside. The disease was terrifying. Like the current coronavirus pandemic, it had to be faced alone, often without friend, minister, or physician.
The pandemic was compounded by miasmatics, an obsolete medical theory that held that diseases — such as cholera, chlamydia, or the plague — were caused by noxious “bad air” (sometimes called night air).
Personal habits were also thought to be a major cause and public health officials sought to protect people they called “poor and vicious” from themselves. Cleanliness helped, but also New York City banned “green and unripe fruits of every kind.” Leaders of the Temperance Movement charged whiskey as the culprit. “Strict Sabbatarians” thought the disease was due to improper regard for the holiness of Sundays.
Many people traveled then on the Erie Canal or on stage coaches on turnpikes passing through communities like Utica, where the Common Council established a Board of Health on June 16, 1832 to make regulations to “prevent the introduction and spread of the disease in the city.”
Property owners were directed to purify and cleanse their house or business and to remove unwholesome substances or water. Lime or chloride of lime was to be used by all to purify residences and other buildings.
A temporary hospital was erected on Broad Street and 50 bushels of lime was bought “for the use of the poor.” Canal boats were directed to a quarantine were they could be “cleansed and purified.” By August 13th Utica had four fatal cases, and the alarm had spread across the city.
It was estimated that 3,000 people left Utica “in search of a securer refuge from the mysterious disease.” All told, Utica had about 200 cases of cholera and about 65 deaths.
A writer in The Utica Daily Gazette 15 years after the episode said that “the bolts of death fell thick and fast. The dead were hurried to their graves as soon as the breath left the body, unaccompanied by friends and without the usual ceremony.”
By September 11, 1832 the board of health announced that there was no danger to people returning to Utica. On September 25th no new cases were reported. As abruptly as the 1832 cholera pandemic had appeared in New York, it dissipated and was largely gone from the State by December of the same year.
A similar epidemic, the Third Cholera Pandemic, returned to the United States in 1849. It is believed that over 150,000 Americans died during the two pandemics.
Illustration: A hand bill from the New York City Board of Health in 1832 (courtesy New York Historical Society).
Often as I travel in rural areas, I wonder what inspired someone to build a home in a lot that doesn’t appear to have been farmland nor a mill. Now I will also wonder if they were fleeing a pandemic.
Thanks for the writing and publication of this article. It supports what little was passed down orally through the years about the birth and very early years of my great-grandfather William George Budd, supposedly b. 12 May 1832 in Rochester, NY, during a cholera epidemic (and d. in Chicago in 1922). The family is said to have been very worried about his survival (and that of his two older brothers, both then under age 5, as well as that of his parents; a third brother would be born after him, in Canada).
William’s father was Leonard (L.?) Budd, my brick-wall Budd ancestor, perhaps b. 1800-1805, with location and parents unknown to me. Since he was said to have been a millwright, he may have been involved in mill construction in/near Rochester at the time and became a more or less itinerant millwright after that, going where there was work. He supposedly married Delia/Adelia Matthews in 1828, location uncertain but perhaps Camden, Oneida Co., where Delia was born and raised. Supposedly, when a mill job was to take a considerable time, his wife and children would go along and live with him nearby.
Delia’s father was Lyman Matthews, part of the extended Matthews family, originally from Conn., that migrated from Vermont to Oneida Co. to become one of the founding families of the Town of Camden. Delia (b, 1806) was the eldest of numerous children born to Lyman and his wife, Polly/Mary Olcott Matthews, before he d. in 1817 (cause unknown) in Camden.
Where and how Leonard and Delia met, I have no idea. Perhaps he was from an Oneida town near Camden? Or perhaps he had been involved in mill construction in or near Camden and met Delia while there? If I’m remembering correctly, they were enumerated in Rochester for the 1830 census.
Now I’m wondering whether the family left Rochester permanently during the epidemic and headed for Delia’s home base of Camden, which was quite rural and likely considered to be safer. Of course, well before 1832 Delia’s mother had remarried to a widower who also had numerous children. Their combined household was huge in 1820. They had four more children (two of whom died young) by about then before they “separated,” divorce apparently being illegal then. If the Budd family of five indeed moved to Camden, they’d likely have set up their own household there. Or it’s possible they moved to or near where Leonard was from, wherever it was but possibly also in Oneida. (Or maybe south of Rochester, in the vicinity of Greece, where apparently there were some Budds?)
In any case, when William was four (in 1836), his father apparently died in/near Demorestville, Canada, while constructing a mill there, supposedly from a construction accident. (Travel back and forth across Lake Ontario for work or family reasons was apparently more common than I’d have thought.) Whether or not his wife and his four sons by then were living there with him temporarily is unknown to me. At any rate, I have learned that Leonard is buried in Demorestville, where somebody (wife? his family?) had a gravestone placed at some point. Delia apparently then raised her sons in Camden and stayed for a considerable time thereafter, at least until after her mother (Polly) died in the early 1850s and parts of the extended Matthews family began to scatter to various points west. It then gets really complicated, but I won’t get into that here.
Those are great stories, thanks for sharing!