In mid-June, 1928, a Lee dairy farmer purchased a cow named Pansy from a herd in northern Vermont. The cow was sick, but nobody realized it. Over the course of the next month, Pansy’s ailment would bring the town to its knees.
Based on local death records, the first fatality appears to have been on Tuesday, July 3, when 64 year old Mary Barrett died at her Summer Street home. Because she’d had pre-existing illnesses, her case was not immediately recognized for what it was.
The death of Edward Childs followed on July 4, and Shannon Stephens on Friday the 6th. By that time, there were over three hundred Lee residents reporting illness, which at first was thought to be influenza. It was difficult to find pall-bearers for Childs’ funeral, so many of his acquaintances were ill.
Five more died on Saturday, and new cases were coming in by the hour, heavily concentrated among Lee residents and a handful of people who’d visited town. Lee’s three doctors- George Wickham, C.W. Stratton, and A.M. O’Connor- traveled relentlessly, augmented by Dr Leland French, the district health officer from Pittsfield. Nancy Ryan, the town’s only visiting nurse, worked day and night to provide all nursing functions until reinforcements began arriving Monday.
By that time a dozen people were dead, though the town’s undertaker and his wife were too ill to handle them.
Commonalities in patients led to looking at local milk supplies, and by Monday samples had revealed the streptococcus germ, confirming a diagnosis of ‘septic sore throat’ (i.e. strep throat). State health commissioner Daniel Bigelow was helping coordinate relief efforts, which centered around the old Hyde school, converted into an emergency hospital.
The hospital was run by Dr. May Holmes, a Lee native. Folks in Lee had laughed at the notion of a “pretty young lady doctor”When Holmes returned to her hometown of with a medical degree in the 1890s.
At 25, she was put in charge of a newly built isolation hospital in Worcester, because they were having a hard time finding nurses and housekeeping staff. “Hire a woman, so she can do everything,” the district medical director literally said. She didn’t visit Lee much after that, as she built up a 9-building complex that became one of the most important infectious disease hospitals in early 20th century New England, and led it through the influenza pandemic in 1918.
Holmes was preparing for vacation when she heard of her hometown’s plight. Instead she arrived in Lee on July 9 with equipment and a squadron of her own skilled staff, including two other distinguished women physicians, Dr. Lillian De Armit and Dr. Jean Black.
Classrooms were filled wall to wall with cots, with 3-4 more deaths added to the toll each day. Milk sales had been halted, church services and public gatherings were prohibited, restaurants ordered to close early. Mills, banks, and stores ran at skeletal staffs or shut down entirely.
New cases seemed to be slowing, though, and by Tuesday health officials expressed optimism that the danger was passing. Only a few dozen cases had been reported from nearby towns where residents had visited Lee, most mild.
Then cases spiked again; eventually 1,000 out of Lee’s population of 4,000 fell serious ill.
By Wednesday, July 11, there were 70 nurses working in Lee, and by Saturday that number had doubled. Still Nancy Ryan worked day and night. She would continue to do so until the emergency hospital closed on July 30. There were many competent nurses on hand by then, but she was the town’s nurse.
There was no cure, though Dr. Holmes was seeing some positive results with serum for scarlet fever, a related streptococcal infection. She was credited with saving at least 100 lives, and later published a study of the epidemic in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Over the course of the following week new cases waned again, and deaths slowed to one every couple of days. By July 20, the school was down to 56 patients, and the danger was declared passed, though deaths from prolonged cases continued through the end of the month.
In total, 48 deaths were counted in Lee (not including a few outlying cases among out-of-town visitors). The septic sore throat outbreak had claimed about 1.2% of its population.
Two months later, a London doctor returning from vacation to his messy lab will notice surprising effects of the mold Penicillium notatum in his petri dishes. A decade after that, three Oxford scientists will develop his random observations into working antibiotics that change the course of human health.
Locally, the epidemic further grew support for milk pasteurization. The town of Lee immediately passed a bylaw requiring it. Commissioner Bigelow pointed to the loss of life- and economic cost, estimated at a million dollars- in an effort to advance bills in the legislature, though with limited result. The issue remained hotly debated long after- and remains a topic of discussion today, with legislation to ease restrictions on raw milk sales introduced on Beacon Hill as recently as this past Spring.
These Mysterious Hills 