Lexington History, continued: tonight The Lexington Times is publishing history deep dives through the night, built from the original newspapers. All clippings below are from the Kentucky Gazette of 1833, which is in the public domain. One in thirteen In the first days of June 1833, Lexington was a city of roughly 7,000 people and one of the proudest places in the West — the “Athens of the West,” home of Transylvania University, Henry Clay, and more lawyers, doctors and newspapers than any town its size had a right to. By the first of August, somewhere around 500 of its people were dead. The committee appointed to count the bodies recorded 489 deaths between June 1 and August 1; later tallies put it at 502. Either way, in two months Lexington buried about one of every thirteen residents — proportionally, the deadliest thing that has ever happened to this city. The killer was Asiatic cholera, the great pandemic disease of the nineteenth century, which had crossed the Atlantic in 1832 and worked its way down the Ohio Valley. Nobody in 1833 knew what it was. The germ theory of disease was decades away; Vibrio cholerae would not be identified until 1883. What Lexington knew was that people who felt fine at breakfast were dead by midnight — and that the disease seemed to rise out of the town itself, out of the stagnant pools and the soggy cellars and the filth-choked Town Branch that ran through the middle of everything. They were closer to right than they knew. Cholera travels in contaminated water, and Lexington in 1833 was a town whose drinking wells sat downhill from its waste. Dr. John E. Cooke, the Transylvania medical professor who later published a clinical account of the epidemic, mapped the deaths and found them clustered around exactly the places a modern epidemiologist would expect: the low ground, the wet cellars on Water Street, and an acre-sized offal dump near Limestone where the spring rains had left standing pools. He blamed the resulting “miasma” — bad air — but his map was a map of bad water. “This disease still lingers in our city” The Kentucky Gazette kept publishing straight through the epidemic, and its pages are the closest thing we have to a diary of the disaster. The issue of Saturday, June 29, 1833 — printed as the worst weeks were ending — opens its local column with a single quiet sentence: “This disease still lingers in our city,” followed by the week’s dead. The list is its own kind of historical document. Mrs. B. B. Smith, Mr. Douglass, Mrs. McKinney. “Mr. Page, (an overseer.)” Mr. Elijah H. Drake. Mary Ann Nixon. And threaded among the full names of white Lexington, the half-names of the enslaved: “Stephen, (black man),” “Henry, a servant of G. B.,” “a black man of Gratz Bruce,” “black man at Mrs. Brooks’s.” Then a separate paragraph for the institution on the hill: “At the Lunatic Asylum — Mary O’Connell, Alfred Lain, Mary Habury, Jno. Armstrong, Mary Iredell, Courtney Knapp, John Huberry, Joseph Erwin.” Eight dead in a week at the asylum alone. The column closes with the week’s only good news: “Lexington is resuming very slowly some appearance of business.” The same page carries the medicine of 1833, and it is harrowing to read. A Nicholasville physician writes in to recommend his treatment with full confidence: “I have bled freely in the spasmodic stage of cholera with entire success… Bleeding, calomel and opium c. and not puking, are the great and certain remedies to cure cholera.” Calomel was mercurous chloride — a mercury purgative — and Dr. Cooke himself later wondered in print whether the heroic dosing, sometimes a quarter-pound of mercury compound over a few days, was killing patients the cholera spared. For a disease that kills by dehydration, the standard of care was bleeding, mercury and opium. The kindest treatments on the page are the incidental ones: ice chips, mint juleps, and camphorated whiskey rubbed on the cramps. “Symptoms and Treatment of Cholera” — the medicine of 1833: bleeding, calomel (mercury) and opium, against a disease that kills by dehydration. Kentucky Gazette, June 29, 1833. (Public domain) The town that fled, and the people who didn’t Perhaps half the town ran — anyone with a horse and somewhere to go. Stores closed, the streets emptied, and for several weeks Lexington functionally ceased to operate as a city. But the Gazette’s June 29 issue also records the other half of the story, in a small item of thanks: with the poor “suffering severely for the want of fire-wood and provisions,” farmers from the surrounding county had been driving wagons into the stricken town, free of charge — Col. Benjamin Taylor, Col. Henry C. Payne and Col. R. Quarles are named, with Payne sending in “from day to day a number of fine lambs” and cords of firewood. Doctors stayed and worked; several died doing it. So did clergy, nurses, and the enslaved men and women who had no choice in the matter and who appear in the death rolls week after week. And then there is the gravedigger. King Solomon William Solomon — “King Solomon,” the nickname was a joke at his expense — was Lexington’s most famous drunk. Virginia-born around 1775, he had come down in the world until he lived effectively on the street, and in 1833 he was convicted of vagrancy. Under the law of the day, a vagrant’s labor could be sold at auction, and Solomon’s was — bought, for a token sum of small change, by a free Black woman remembered as Aunt Charlotte, who knew him and seems to have bid mostly to keep anyone crueler from doing so. Weeks later the cholera came. Gravediggers were suddenly the most necessary tradesmen in Lexington, and several of the men who ordinarily did the work had fled or refused — the corpses themselves were thought to breathe contagion. Solomon, who was afraid of very little and had nothing to lose, picked up a spade and spent the epidemic digging. Tradition says whiskey was his prophylactic; whatever the reason, he worked through the worst weeks in the burying grounds — much of that ground today’s Old Episcopal Burying Ground on Third Street — putting Lexington’s dead, high and low, into the earth as fast as they came. How much of the rest is true is harder to say, and honesty requires saying so. The most beloved scene in the story — court reconvening that fall, a judge stepping down from the bench to shake the old vagrant’s hand, the whole room rising to follow — comes to us through James Lane Allen’s 1891 short story “King Solomon of Kentucky,” which made Solomon a Kentucky legend a generation after his death and freely mixed fact with romance. The documented bones are sturdy enough: the vagrancy sale, the epidemic grave-digging, the genuine gratitude of the town afterward. Solomon lived another two decades, mostly poor, and died in November 1854. Lexington buried him in the Lexington Cemetery — founded just five years earlier, in part because the city’s churchyard burying grounds had been overwhelmed by exactly the kind of mass death Solomon had shoveled through. In 1908, admirers raised a monument over his grave; it stands today, a short walk from Henry Clay’s column, marking the town drunk who stayed when the respectable people ran. What it left behind Cholera came back — 1849 was nearly as bad, and 1854 took another toll, including Solomon’s contemporaries — and the epidemics left fingerprints all over the city we live in. The Lexington Cemetery (1849) exists in part because of them. So, eventually, did a public waterworks and the long, never-quite-finished project of doing something about the Town Branch, the buried creek the city has lately been daylighting in parks and trails — a stream Lexingtonians of 1833 had every reason to regard as an open sewer, because it was one. And in the Old Episcopal Burying Ground on East Third, many of the 1833 dead still lie where one stubborn, much-mocked man buried them. Lexington has remembered the legend, on and off, ever since: Allen’s story, the 1908 monument, a PBS Kentucky Life episode, the occasional toast. The legend earns its keep. But the Gazette’s plain June 29 column may be the better memorial — the named and the half-named dead, the asylum’s eight, the farmers’ lambs, and a city promising itself, in print, that it was “resuming very slowly some appearance of business.” Sources: Kentucky Gazette (Lexington), June 29, 1833 (public domain; page images via newspapers.com); Dr. John E. Cooke’s account of the 1833 epidemic in the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, as summarized by Kentucky Historic Institutions; Wikipedia, “Cholera epidemic in Lexington, Kentucky”; Lexington Cemetery notable-burials records and Find A Grave memorial 12159 (William “King” Solomon, 1775–1854); James Lane Allen, “King Solomon of Kentucky,” in Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales (1891); PBS Kentucky Life, “Lexington’s 1833 Cholera Epidemic.” The post One in thirteen: the 1833 cholera epidemic, and the town drunk who buried Lexington’s dead appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less