 We are at the Sheboyne County Historical Museum for our third Saturday in February 16, 2013. We have a program of lots of history for you today. Our theme is Calamities, Wind, Water, Fire, and Human Error. You'll be able to see lots of information on all of that. We start out with the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. We have a number of different episodes that happened during that time. Then you will move on to the syncing of the Phoenix. We have lots of information about the people who are involved in that. We also are very, very lucky to have an author who has written a book called The Shadow of the Phoenix that was published in 2011. Then we have a number of videos on the fires that we had in the Sheboyne area. We have two former firefighters, one fireman chief, who are here to help you learn about those. Then we also have some information on the I-43 car crash that involved many, many people from the area and involved a number of deaths. Then we also go into some of the fires, the major fires in the county, the Waldo Mill fire. We have information on it. We have a person who actually helped catch one of the victims that were able to be saved from that fire. We also have information on the Globe Lanes fire that was in Random Lake. Then we also had a major, major tornado that was in our county that we are covering information on. Then we have a number of snowstorms, major snowstorms that we had through the years. We have lots for you to see. We had lots of help with resource people who gave us information on this. I hope that you enjoy the day. Hi. I'm Mary Jane Gruett and I'm delighted to be here today to talk to you about the Phoenix. The Phoenix, as you know, is this ship that was bringing Dutch immigrants to Sheboygan County and it had stopped overnight in Manitowoc because of a bad storm. Manitowoc is a better harbor than Sheboygan, at least it did at that time. It stopped there overnight and stayed in the harbor at about one o'clock in the morning. After the seas had calmed down, the captain gave orders for the boat to start heading to Sheboygan. About three o'clock in the morning, there were some people, some men, one who was an Irish engineer and he smelled smoke, a kind of different kind of smoke that they were used to because of course this was a wood burning boat and they loaded up a lot of cordwood right there in Manitowoc. They went to the boiler room and spoke to the people there but they didn't pay much attention to them and so the fire just got worse and worse and worse until you can see on this picture, you can see the lifeboats down here, you can see one here and here and you can also see the fire actually was in the middle of the ship. People were crowding to the front of the ship and also to the back of the ship and getting as far away from the fire as possible. But the fire, actually the boat burned to the hull, it burned to the water line and two lifeboats got to shore, there possibly were three but one was possibly capsized while loading and so those people did not make it to shore as well. After they noticed in Cheboygan that the fire, they could see the fire from Cheboygan and they wanted to send people, send boats to rescue them. They sent a one schooner, a wind, sails and there was not much wind that morning, just a light wind so it took them a long time to get there. The Delaware was a boat that ran on steam as well and it needed to get the steam up so even though they knew about this at four o'clock in the morning the Delaware didn't get there until seven and about the same time that's when the other schooner, the wind sailing ship got there as well as one of the rowboats at that time came back to the Phoenix as well and there were three survivors hanging on the bottom of the ship somehow hanging onto the chains etc. at the bottom of the ship and they were rescued and taken along to Cheboygan. Meanwhile the people that had been in the lifeboats, they went, some of them walked to Cheboygan and the captain got a ride because he had been injured on the boat, he had slipped on icy boat in Ohio and it injured his knee and I believe it got infected and he was unable to walk so he was confined to this cabin for the whole time basically the whole time of the journey and do you have any questions about that? That anything? The number I've read the number as far as 200, 250, how many people survived? Sorry I'm thinking of how many were on the boat. Yes probably as high as 300 I think it's probably around 250 that's that's my my number 46 46 those three that were hanging at the bottom of the ship and the lifeboats and that is all he was he got into the first lifeboat he was possibly just you know this is best for you just you can't help anyway just go ahead kind of thing because of the injury yes and I think that's why he got into the lifeboat and got to shore first and he actually I would say probably hired somebody to take him to to Cheboygan since he was you know a wagon something like that that could be so the life landed very close to Whistling Straits Haven a little town of Haven where Whistling Straits golf course now well they look for their families those that were surviving look for the rest the rest of their families hopefully who were rescued on that ship but there was no one except the three people that were hanging at the bottom of the ship one was a passenger a Mr. Long who had family I believe in Milwaukee and two of the crew members they were familiar with you know what the ship was like and we're able to it's it's it's pretty scary but we have we have information in the smaller book of the Fesqua Centennial Mary Luke and you pick that up over there that one that one that one mm-hmm yes these are family stories about what happened and there's there also things that were written down by various people newspaper clipings and things like that that were that they found the stories from and so you can find that in this book this is a really good very good resource thank you after 1847 November 21st 1847 terrible time to be out on Lake Michigan especially when there's a nor'easter right now we're looking at one of the Bibles well I'm sorry the only Bible that we know of that was rescued from the Phoenix we think that it had to have gotten into the lifeboat with the family that that owned it there was a mom and a dad and four siblings did not survive the mom dad and four siblings four siblings did not survive but four girls did their four four of their daughters did and they brought this got this Bible to shore and one of the reasons one of the reasons that people were leaving from Holland was because of the situation the religious situation there was some persecution going on by neighbors a little bit by officials of the government but so religious things in Christianity were very important to these people and you can see what a huge Bible it is and it's a real treasure treasure it was donated then by this went land a weird family to the research Center in 1963 many of these people who were on the Phoenix came to settle in Gibbsville and Usberg and this that this area of Sheboygan County the lady over there knows a lot more about all of the immigrants and where they lived and that kind of a thing I did not grow up in Sheboygan County and I am not a person who can claim that I was a I'm a descendant of survivors but I just got interested in it in fact could you bring could you bring that pap muzzle puzzle thing that's right the big thing right here in this end I'm sorry this is really going to be you're going to have to edit this a lot how did I first get interested in the Phoenix you this is so interesting we have a tradition of buying a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and our family and what happened was that I bought this one that year and we put it together and over here right here about Sheboygan it says 200 Dutch immigrants lost offshore 1847 and we thought I've never heard of that before I was raised in Wisconsin schools I have no idea I've never heard of that and well time went on a couple of years later my husband got a new employment got new employment in Sheboygan and we moved to Sheboygan County so we're right in the heart of Phoenix information and Phoenix history so that's how I got interested and I got interested in enough to do a lot of research about it and ended up writing this book Shadow of the Phoenix it starts in Holland but it's the story of one boy who with his family comes to America he is on the Phoenix with his family now the boy himself is fictitious he and his family are fictitious and I have him his family all our do not survive except for he and his little brother and then the rest of the the rest of the story takes place in Sheboygan County how he goes around he's trying to find work because he needs work in order to get back to Holland he wants to go back to Holland because that's where it was safe comfortable and so he goes around to different places in Sheboygan County he's in Amsterdam Beach he's at Usberg East Usberg and also at the Wade House so there's a lot of history in Sheboygan County history in the book as well so thank you my name is Mary Lou Jume and I do a lot of volunteer work at the Usberg Historical Society I am a survivor my ancestors were survivors of the Phoenix there were 24 Dutch survivors and out of those 24 three of them were my ancestors and I can point the families out for you these were my father's grandparents the Wilterdings and Mr. Wilterdings wife and five children I think drowned but Mr. Wilterdings was in a lifeboat he was one of the people that had an ore that was starting to get it to land and this lady was the maid she came with the Wilterdings family and she was in a different lifeboat and through some misunderstanding only these two survived and they didn't know they were each on a different lifeboat later on he married the maid and they had a large family of children then also over here is my mother's grandfather he was also a survivor I don't think any he came with any family so he just came alone and he happened to be one of the survivors also they both lived in the Gibbsville area most of the survivors went to either Gibbsville or Cedar Grove because they had family members that were living there this board is of some of the other families of survivors I own Heinen was very instrumental in writing these stories up she and I work together on some of these things this woman here Mrs. Aunt Pete and Paul was also a survivor and that's why I own was interested in it you know why did he came to the United States my family the family story says most of them came for economic reasons they also suffered somewhat from the potato famine and they wanted they came with large families many of them and they wanted more opportunity for their children because there was more land here they came was quite a bit of money to buy land in the area and I don't know what happened to the money I think it's maybe at the bottom of Lake Michigan for all I know that was their main reason although they did value religious freedom too but I don't think they were part of the secession group that came for totally religious reasons this is a model of a little ship that Mr. Louis Rousseau made Mary Rousseau was very instrumental along with Iowan Heinen in writing the materials of the family about the families who survived and her father made this little model of the ship this little book was the first book written about the Phoenix and up on the top there are the pictures of the people who wrote this little book in 1987 I think so these two volumes were written by Mary Rousseau and Iowan Heinen the first volume tells all the different family stories there were many stories each family had their own story and very interesting then the second volume has all the genealogies of all the different families that were survivors the 24 family I think the number of people I don't know how many people that involves today but they were they were survivors I'm Jack Johnson resident of Aldo I was involved in rescuing the wife and children of the demensifier and where the mill millburn town and my son and I which was Ted Johnson and officer cram from the Sheriff's Department we she threw the little guy out of this third story window he's five years old and then she came out and I literally kept caught her in my arms she would probably made about a hundred pounds she was just a little the two other boys they ducked back into the into the building they wouldn't jump out so we couldn't save them they lived on the I believe the doors were nailed shut because I tried to get in the doors and they couldn't they didn't move you know I'm not just a little fellow and believe it or not I was outside the building the whole time and I got taken in for smoke inhalation I wound up in the in the hospital also and it was quite a lengthy investigation they did a lot of digging and stopping the back they're looking for other evidence for other things that you could possibly involved with they believe this was arson in the back in the back end of the building there it was on the on the south side that's where the fire escapes were and the exit to the house but he was there was several things going on there that nobody knew about you know with sexual things and stuff you know no I'm not my son was no I live next door I looked out the window my my cunhounds were barking I looked out the window and they're doing was there was my son hollard there was a there's a fire next door no fire was coming out under the eaves at a building already so any other questions or it was it started at four o'clock in the morning on September 17 1989 October 16 1983 the Prangie fire downtown Sheboygan I was off duty at the time however I was called in to active duty and when I arrived at the scene approximately 6 p.m. the entire building was concretely involved in flames it was now our position to protect the exposures we couldn't prevent building from burning down but we just protected the explosions and we spent the entire day and night there it was a suspected arson however to my knowledge it has never been proven to be arson we couldn't find couldn't find the victim or couldn't find it anyone that was responsible for it also as far as I know there was no injuries to the Indiana firefighters to any other residents other than this minor injuries not nothing very devastating it was the time was working on it prior to the fire I did talk to Tom Bittain who was the demolition contractor and I did advise that he keep his trucks as far away from the building as possible for gasoline and diesel possibility of fires with those and that was a good thing also that that would have created a lot of extended fire had he had his trucks closer he it was a big loss to the city a big department store that was later on rebuilt by Prangies and then sold to another company good morning my name is Larry Schneider I'm a retired firefighter from the city of Sheboygan I had 31 years in the Sheboygan fire department and I had gotten a call about two weeks or three weeks ago from Joanne Getiky indicating they were gonna have a program out here today in regards to history and fires and other calamities that happened in the city and County of Sheboygan I was asked by Joanne to put together whatever information I might have that would show some of the fires some of the rescues and some of the things that the fire department has been up against in the years that I was in the department and some of the clippings even date back further than that as you might see here probably one of the biggest and largest fires that I was at was the Thona fire and we have pictures and they're on the boards and we've got a specific booklet here that also shows just the beginning parts of the fire and eventually there was an explosion in that building that took out a lot of the main water pipes in there so there was no sprinkler system that helped us fight that that fire and you can see that it was very ferocious and early in the day it was probably oh and if I want to guess to say the 50 degree temperature and by later on in the day the wind that shifted out of the northeast and we had actually had snow flurries and it didn't help us fight the fire because it pushed the fire from one side of the building to the other side of the building eventually the building was torn down it was located on the north 11th Street approximately where the old verifying dairy was off of Water Street we've got many pictures here that show pictures of rescues which is some of the fire department does almost daily and that is car accidents where people are trapped inside the vehicle where they need extrication tools to get the people out whether they need to take roofs off doors off push-up steering wheels and so forth just to extricate the people from the vehicle a couple of the posters and they came from clippings that Joanne put together that I had in my scrapbooks is here's a picture of myself and this happened many years ago which was an early morning house fire and I always liked that picture because I look a lot younger in there but it was a small house fire in the morning fortunately the mother and the two children were able to get out before the fire got too far along the firefighters arrived on scene we put the fire out in a very short period of time but we did find a pet a dog in there who was rescued brought out was not breathing at the time and believe it or not one of our firefighters gave that pet mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and brought the dog back to life again so very proud of that we have both fires that happened on the river and I was at that fire there which eventually later brought this fire department into owning their own fire boat we cooperated very well with the Coast Guard but in a lot of cases now being on the lake as she boy again is we sometimes need to get out into the water whether it's a rescue for somebody that's ill or sick on another boat or if there are any types of fires are people in the water that are possibly drowning so this fire department now has their own rescue boat that is stationed down during the summer months down at the Harbor Center down there so that they can get into it and be out and try and do whatever they need to do in a very short period of time another rescue that's up on the board up here is the shopco incidents for when they were building the shopco building the department store one of the walls collapsed during heavy winds while the construction workers were working on that building if I'm correct one person had died on scene there were about seven or eight various people that were injured in the actual incident with one man dying and I believe later on another person passed away because of the injuries he received at that fire I could go on and on here I just want to say that I'm very grateful and thankful that Joanne called me because it's refreshed my memories and if we can keep this stuff alive and let people know what you know some of the problems we had in the city of Sheboygan maybe some way we can find ways to prevent them from happening in the future one of my jobs when I was in the fire department was going out and doing safety talks and I know I had a fire death in a hole in a house fire on it was Gile Avenue and I always use the pictures from the investigation at that fire because what had happened at that fire was the people the residents the husband and wife that lived there took their smoke detector off the wall because it was located very close to a bathroom and every time they would take a shower or a bath the smoke detector would go off because of the humidity well they had to smoke detector off and there was a cooking stove fire while the lady was resting in bed and she was never able to get out of the house so what I have is a picture of a it looks like the moon with everything black behind it and that's actually where the white wall is where they took the smoke detector off with no batteries in it and that part of the wall did not get scorched or burned and that's how I started out my presentation so the point is if you really need to have smoke detectors and you need to keep them operating in your home we never once to my knowledge while I was in the fire department had a fire death in a home where it had actual working smoke detectors we had fire deaths in the city but in most cases in all other cases I should say the smoke detectors were either not functioning properly or the batteries were removed and so we asked for your safety to always keep your smoke detectors operating and hopefully you know we'll save lives by doing that hello my name is Ed Carsted I was employed by the highway department for 38 years and today their historical society has a little presentation here set up on some of the snow equipment that was in Sheboygan County and some of the snowstorms and also the ice storms of like 1976 we have a little literature and a lot of pictures that came from a book that the highway department had of accumulated pictures from over the years and the snowstorms that we had plowing snow and also some of the ice storm and all the damage that was caused by that a lot of people can reminisce and and say and well in this year I was here and they can really relate to a lot of the items that are shown here we also have some at this table of tornado that went through Howard's Grove in 1974 some of the pictures here are from 1971 and snowstorm and that went through the area and how it really immobilizes everybody around and catches you by surprise even though the weatherman should give you a warning it doesn't always work that way have some articles about in some trade magazines that were written about snow plowing in Sheboygan County and some of the Oshkosh trucks that they've had and FWDs we have some pictures of the snowball or that is currently used at the airport that they were obtained from the Naval Air Force or I think an Air Force base in Dayton Ohio that is currently being used at the airport Charlie Schwinn from Sheboygan I lived in Howard Grove 75 years and met my wife she came from Ada and we this is kind of a passion of ours doing scrapbooking and there's a lot of pictures here of fires ice storms tornadoes and go some of this goes back a long way but they said like genealogy without pictures doesn't really mean anything so if you got pictures you can relate better to what the story is all about that basically is why we do that weddings wedding anniversaries funerals and lots of disasters I here's a picture of snow storm in Sheboygan 15 inches 19th of March 1971 that late in the year 15 inches of snow hello I'm Steve Sharper retired Deputy Chief from the Sheboygan fire department and it was in August of 1998 the Sheboygan flood which is our topic today I came on duty that morning and you could tell already as you came to work that it was going to be a special day there was water running in the streets and many of the people that have visited with me today have said the same thing we received 10 inches of rain that day in a little over six hours and it was about midway through the morning after already being on a number of calls that we got a report about the Dr. Wick residence on North East Street being flooded and actually the report was that it was moving off of the foundation we responded myself and the police officer our other fire units were committed at the time and he was in the house and the most stable part of the house seemed to be the garage area and we motioned to him to go to the garage shortly after he was in the garage the garage floor collapsed because this large amount of water that had been rushing against the foundation was chewing away at that foundation and we had to get a rope and get it fast and the fire engines had committed their equipment we did get one engine company there but they didn't have any ropes left so we got a water ski tow rope from a neighbor's garage and we threw that to him and it kept getting taken down by the rushing water vortex so we were wondering what do we do next we needed to do something fast we couldn't go in the water ourselves due to the great force of the water and a plastic jug from Preston antifreeze came floating past and I grabbed that tied it to the rope and we were able to float that rope right to him and pulled him to safety shortly after we got him out of the water the entire garage collapsed so it was within seconds of that happening that we actually grabbed him and had him back up on dry land shortly after that in fact it was within five minutes after I left that scene we got a call about the cemetery building being on fire at the Calvary cemetery which is right across the street from from his residence that's this photo here where the main building in the cemetery had been struck by lightning and was burning I couldn't believe it when we first got the call because everything was so wet and the last thing you would have expected that day was to have a house fire and or any kind of a structure fire and sure enough it was burning and it was burning well and firefighters fighting that fire actually were wading in water waste deep and holding on to hoses the caretaker of the cemetery was there and the one thing that he pointed out to us was that they had their records there from the cemetery all the burial records and the plots and it was important that those records were saved and he showed us which part of the building they were in so we were able to prevent the fire from spreading into that area and actually we didn't want to put too much water on that area either because you want to soak those records so that that came to a successful outcome also I know that in the Sheboygan area that that day there were about 125 homes that had their foundations cave in the Dr. Wick rescue and this fire that was late morning probably between 10 a.m. and noon that that happened and as I remember by by the middle of the afternoon things had settled down and then it was just a lot of helping people with pumping out basements and whatever and I look at I look at the past and brings back memories and a couple months ago when the hurricane sandy thing was in New York and New Jersey reminded me about our Sheboygan flood and the one thing that we were we were fortunate about that day is that it was in August and the weather was warm I think about the people in New York and New Jersey where after that hit then the temperature was about 35 degrees and I can't imagine the rescuers or the people after math that you're there no power in your homes no heat no running water and now the temperature is at or near freezing that would that would be a brutal brutal existence for a period of time before things things could get back to normal so it's a day August 6 1998 is a day in Sheboygan history that I'll never I'll never forget and I can tell by the comments made to me today by people who have stopped at our booth over there about the doctor wick rescue a lot of people will remember that that day for a long time so this is gonna cover calamities in Sheboygan in particular and we're looking at really the early part of the 20th century this was actually originally created by Bill Wongaman he isn't able to be here today he isn't feeling well so he entrusted me with it my name is Tamara I'm the collections coordinator here at the museum so I'm cuter than Bill but I may not be quite as entertaining so just bear with me we are gonna start right at the turn of the century when a tornado came through Sheboygan here August 20th of 1900 and you can see from this map which is a modern map but the tornado came in right about at 17th and Indiana and it moved kind of in a southeasterly direction a lot of very typical damage a lot of roofs ripped off you can see that there were a lot of windows knocked out and things like that as well additionally there were some buildings that were destroyed you can see here we have a roof on the left and a roof on the right as well it continued on one of the next places that it hit was right around 12th and Georgia higher steeple of Bethlehem Lutheran Church now you can see on the left part of the picture here there's some damage to the house next door and there's some debris laying between the church and the home but you'll notice that the steeple is nowhere to be found in the picture that's because the steeple was found three blocks away from the church it continued close to the lake so that that whole myth that we don't have tornadoes because we're we're on the lake here in Sheboygan is really not true they do happen and they can get very close to the lake at a think Clara it actually did a fair amount of damage to the trolley barn for the trolley cars for Sheboygan and if you look kind of in the center of the picture you can see the damage to the building but you can see it picked up some of the trolleys and just toss them about as well curves back around it comes out and then it kind of takes this curve back up and ends up hitting Longfellow school which because this happened in August it was really good the kids weren't in school yet yeah there was damage but nobody was hurt within the school and actually nobody was killed in this tornado either unfortunately that's not the case for the next one we're going to see which is the trolley accident that happens in February of 1990 1911 February 9th 1911 the trolley at that time traveled over the 8th Street Bridge so you can see that's the 8th Street Bridge now on the lower right we have the A Street Bridge as well now that's actually even an later version than the one that this accident happened on the one that the accident happened on did have kind of a center girder you can kind of see something right back here in the middle and the bridge at that point in time rather than lifting up actually pivoted in the center and it would turn so it would be parallel to the Sheboygan River of course that's for boats to pass by and there was a boat that needed to pass through and so they opened up the bridge for the boat to pass by well unfortunately at that same point in time there was a car coming down a trolley car coming down George teamie was the motorman and he could see that he was going to have to start stop the trolley he's traveling south on A Street and so he goes through the stages of stopping the trolley car the first thing is apply the brakes that doesn't work he's still going too fast then he dropped sand he starts dropping sand in front of the wheels which he could trigger from inside the trolley that doesn't slow them down enough finally his last step is to actually throw the motors into reverse and unfortunately that is still not enough and the trolley car goes off the bridge into the Sheboygan River with seven people on board they have the conductor and the motormen and five passengers all three of the women that were passengers die in this accident they were the two older ladies were teachers they were from Sheboygan Falls the younger lady Olga was from Sheboygan they are said to have essentially frozen they knew they knew they weren't going to stop the the motormen the conductor everybody on board and they started yelling you know you've got to jump you've got to jump you've got to get out of the car and they just the story goes that they froze injured in the accident were the two personnel the motormen and mr. Weber the conductor along with a salesman a traveling salesman from Milwaukee now there was a fifth gentleman and he was able to escape without injury now this is another photo when they were bringing that car up out of the water and you can see behind it the tug boat behind it and that's actually the tugboat that had been passing through when they had opened the opened the bridge for them to go through now interestingly enough there were actually two trials that occurred with this accident one was for the Sheboygan Light Power and Railway Company the other was actually for the motormen George Theme was charged with four with fourth-degree manslaughter in this accident ultimately he was found not guilty but it was a long and it was a pretty heated trial our next tragedy our next calamity that occurs is in August of 1930 August 19th 1930 Sheboygan is host to the American Legion State Convention and they throw a gala parade it was it was the parade of all parades and you can see the people lined up and there were bands and there were hundreds of people in the parade and you can even see if you look up in the windows you can see the people in the windows looking on and so viewing the parade became an issue finding somewhere for everybody to be that they could see now in 1930 this is actually a picture from 1950 but in 1930 the Rex theater which is on the left of the screen was a was a was the Fox theater and they had a very similar canopy out front and so they decided to allow people to go out onto the canopy to watch the parade 40 or 50 people later the canopy collapsed it just it wasn't designed to hold that kind of weight and it certainly wasn't designed to hold that kind of weight out at the front edge where everybody wanted to stand so they could see the parade now unfortunately who not only were people thrown off of the canopy but there were some people that were trapped underneath because of course there were people standing underneath the canopy when it came down so ultimately this was this was kind of the end of the parade at that point right about that same time governor Kohler was passing by and he actually turned his cars around and asked them to help transport people to the hospital so our last thing we're going to cover is actually what is sometimes called the forgotten catastrophe or the forgotten calamity and it is the flu it is the 1918 flu pandemic I'm sure most of you have probably heard of it sometimes it's referred to as the Spanish flu and so the question really becomes you know how deadly was it and so these are just some statistics to give you an idea an estimated 50 million people died with this flu some populations like the Eskimo population in Alaska lost 60% of the people there and just for a reference this this flu outbreak killed 2.5% of those people that were infected the average death rate with the with influenza is less than 1 tenth of 1% okay so this is extraordinarily high this flu kind of breaks out in in two separate phases the first phase happens in March and April and you can see from the graph up on the left we have a little spike in March and April in the United States it pretty much breaks out in March in Kansas on a military base at Fort Riley within a week 500 people are sick in the infirmary but here's the thing with this first phase it's pretty typical flu it's not unusually deadly it most people recover within a few days and it follows the pretty typical pattern for a flu virus and a flu outbreak unfortunately the flu comes back in the fall and you can see it starting in September skyrocketing in October and continuing on through November and December and the map that is on the the right-hand side if you look at it those spots that are either vertical lines or the just the horizontal lines those are basically the end of September the last week in September and the beginning of October that's how fast the second phase of the flu just it explodes across the country and it actually explodes across the world it's far more severe they believe that that influenza had mutated it was it many people were infected the death rate escalated and another unusual thing about this was who got sick in that second phase of the flu an unusual number of young healthy adults ended up dying from the flu so you know the the dotted line is the typical you know kind of who is affected most particularly to the point where it the influenza kills while with this that 20 to 30 35 age group had a huge number of deaths and it actually that year the average life expectancy in the US dropped by 12 years because of this so of course early on there's blame and who's to blame where did this flu come from what is going on early on there was a lot of talk that it must be the Germans remember this is still the middle of World War one we're still in the middle of the war you know it must be the Germans they must be spreading this and especially because it's hitting young adults that age that would be soldiers it's to its untrue and in fact Germany was hit really really hard another part of blame seems to have been some connection there was some thought maybe it's related to the battlefields all these people are dying on the battlefields and they're not it's not being cleaned up fast enough and there's fumes and maybe it's related to that eventually it comes to be called the Spanish flu Spain was one of the first countries to be hard hit but they were not hit any disproportionately harder than other places it's just they didn't have wartime restrictions as much on the press and so once it hit Spain word really started to spread and it exploded you can also see that a big part of how it was believed to have been spread was by spitting and so we see lots of laws develop about spitting no spitting in public no you know coughing in public no sneezing in public in Wisconsin this is kind of how it plays out and you can see that for deaths sheboygan had sheboygan county had 207 which is pretty high compared to most of the area surrounding us within the city there were 2400 recorded cases and just between October and December kind of that height of the outbreak there were 1868 new cases reported and you can see that real spike in the outbreak and the associated deaths in that October time frame so obviously the how the height of the outbreak is in October and so this is it kind of plays out really pretty quickly on October 10th the sheboygan press headline declares the whole state is closed people are encouraged to stay home don't go out if you buy something from a store and you don't want it don't bother to return it they're not going to take it back on the 12th the city health department the director warns that the city isn't an epidemic it's an epidemic outbreak it's out of control two emergency hospitals have to be open they open a hospital at 99 Hall and they also open a hospital in a hotel in 14th in michigan within a week dr. Reich of the health department orders that homes be placarded and the city council has an emergency meeting because they're in a crisis okay and they're gonna establish some ordinances and things we'll talk about one in just a minute one week later dr. Reich of the health department says conditions are improving and the end is in sight so within a two week time frame we go from an epidemic and it's a crisis to things are getting better this is an example of one of the placards that was required on home so this one is from the city of Milwaukee but the one we've seen one from sheboygan and it looked just the same except it said city of sheboygan and you'll notice nobody can come or go from a house if influenza is there that must be posted unless you're a physician a nurse or a clergyman and it can only be removed by the order of somebody from the health department you can't just take it down yourself other prevention and part of that those city crisis meetings they do establish an ordinance in sheboygan that there will be no expectorating in public places sidewalks are on public conveyances the police department is told to enforce it they're not kidding the health department isn't kidding we're not just passing this you know to pass it you need to enforce it and the if you are caught it is severe five days hard labor or a $5 fine so here is just a few final statistics to put it in perspective as much as 207 people died 600,000 died in the US alone and you can see the same as here 200,000 almost 200,000 people in October that 600,000 is an average of 1,643 people a day for an entire year and at that point in time if you were a soldier if you were involved in World War one you were far more likely to die of the flu than you were to be killed in combat and that actually is true of every single war you are more likely in 1918 to die from influenza than anything any sort of battle that had occurred and you can see worldwide 30 to 50 million people 10 million people in India alone and it's estimated that half of the population ended up with the flu during this during this pandemic and so as Bill said that's all for now and here's our wish that you never experience a calamity of any of those magnitudes so thank you very much