[narrator VO] This program is brought to you by the generous support of the Secular Society, advancing the interests of women in the arts in Virginia and beyond.

♪♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday I write the book ♪ ♪♪ -Welcome, I'm Rose Martin, and we are Write Around the Corner in Roanoke, Virginia, with debut author Lon Wagner.

His book, "The Fever, the Most Fatal Plague in American History", takes us to Norfolk and Portsmouth in 1855 for 100 days of the yellow fever epidemic.

Lon, welcome to Right Around the Corner.

-Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

-[Rose] Well, and this was such an interesting story, because I didn't know a lot about this time period in history, and I certainly did not know a lot about mosquitoes.

But before we get to that, I understand you have kind of always been involved in science, you loved science from the time that you first thought, "What do I want to do with my life?"

-I have been, but I'm not particularly good at it.

-[Rose] Okay.

[chuckles] -So, I became a writer, and I--one of my skills, I suppose, is translating science so that every person can understand it, no matter their level of knowledge.

And that's very useful, because I think a lot of people would be intimidated by scientific language, by just the processes behind science.

So, to make that relatable and interesting, you've definitely done that in "The Fever".

-Thanks so much.

-[Rose] So, currently you're working at Virginia Tech.

And so, you're working a full-time job, and you found a way to also write a novel.

How did you do that?

-Well, I found that I wake up early anyway and can't get back to sleep.

And so, I took advantage of that, and for about a year, I got up every morning and I was ready to write at 5:30 in the morning.

And so, I could put in about two hours before I had to get ready for my real job, and I would mark it down.

I would write, you know, the date, and I would write how many words I wrote that day.

And then on Saturdays and Sundays in the mornings, I would get up and I would just start writing right away, and I'd write up until about 11 or noon.

-How many words did you do a day?

-A bad day would be maybe 350 words.

On one Saturday, I wrote as many as 1,700, but average, I would say 5-600 was a pretty solid day.

-Did you keep yourself in the chair, even if you weren't sure what you're gonna write on those 300-word days?

-I had a friend that says inspiration can only come -if your butt is in the seat.

-[Rose laughs] And so, I did try to keep myself in the chair for that period of time.

-And you've got three girls, so were they supportive of Dad evolving and saying he wants to write a book now?

-I think one reason that-- one thing that motivated me to write this is that I had talked about writing it for a long time, and my daughter's heard this.

And so, I really wanted to complete the task and show them that when you have a goal, you know, you need to really stick to it down through the months and the years to get that thing done.

-So they inspired you, because this originally, this whole concept was a 14-part series that you did for the paper when you were working -for the pilot, right?

-Right.

So, what was that all about, this interest for where it even came from and then how it stayed with you?

-Well, there's a story behind the story.

-[Rose] Okay.

-And that is I lived in Colonial Place in Norfolk, which is surrounded by water, the neighborhood and the city.

And in the early 2000s, 2004, 2005, there were a series of Nor'easters and near-miss hurricanes that flooded the area.

And I read in the community news that there was gonna be an expert from the city health department, that our neighborhood had a problem with rats.

And so, I didn't want to have a problem with rats at my house, so I went to the civic league meeting, and there was this woman there, and she came from the health department, and she was the division of vector control.

I didn't even know at the time -what is-- -I don't, yeah.

a vector is an animal that transports a virus -from one thing to another.

-[Rose] Oh.

And someone is actually in charge of that for the city.

-Right.

-Okay.

-And there's a reason, right?

And so, she got up there in front of the civic league meeting, and she started talking about rats and mosquitoes, and at one point, you know, she was talking about multiple ways to kill rats, and somebody raised their hand and said, well, is there a humane way to kill the rats?

And she said, well, there are traps called Have A Heart, but you can have a heart now, but you have to kill them sometimes.

-Hmm.

-And so, I became fascinated with, like, who is this woman that really hates rats -and mosquitoes so much?

-[Rose] Mm-hmm.

-And I thought I would do a story about, you know, what we jokingly called the rat lady -was going to be the headline.

-[Rose] Yeah.

-And that story didn't pan out, and my last meeting with her, I said, "Why are you so obsessed with rats and mosquitoes?"

And she said, "Well, I'm sure you've heard of the yellow fever epidemic of 1855."

And I had heard a little, but I didn't know the full story.

-And that's what got it going.

And that was actually nominated for a Pulitzer, right?

-It was.

-[Rose] Congratulations.

-Thank you.

-[Rose] So, what was the research like?

Because to write a novel about a subject, I'm sure it's very different than writing a 14-part series for a newspaper.

So, how was it different and how was it alike?

-With something that happened 150, 175 years ago, if something wasn't written down at the time, then it's gone.

And so, I had to find all sorts of different sources of information so that I could get the things, the sort of characteristics of writing that go into a novel.

You know, the detail, the description, the dialogue was really hard to come by.

So, I eventually found three or four or five different people who had written firsthand accounts, maybe letters or journal entries of that summer.

And I was able to piece together the conversational parts that I thought were really important to make people feel like you're there on the street in 1855.

-Wow.

And you do.

I mean, when I'm reading this book, I'm getting to know the characters.

But I think one of the things we want everyone to know is this is absolutely true.

-[Lon] I was very insistent.

There were people along the way.

There were book agents that said, you know, you could fictionalize this and it'd be an easy sell and maybe move it to a bigger city where there's a bigger market like Philadelphia or New Orleans.

And I was very insistent that I didn't want to do that because at the end of this, every time somebody is reading a chapter or page or when they get to the end, I want them to be able to say, wow, I can't believe that really happened.

-And that's true.

And you do.

And in your mind also with some of the characters, I've created my own version of their story, right?

So, what they were doing or where they went or who the people were in their lives.

So, you left that open.

You know, you left that open for us.

And yet the pure scientist in you I'm sure was looking at this saying, okay, so what are the symptoms?

What exactly happens when you do this?

How do you organize all of that data and all of those facts along with all the scientific stuff that happened around yellow fever and still be able to get a story?

-Well, I think as far as the-- I mean, mosquitoes are fascinating, right?

I mean, we've seen some this summer in New England where they've had to close a park because of triple E and it's killed a couple people.

-I have a whole new appreciation for mosquitoes now after reading this book.

I'm gonna tell you.

-Right, right.

-I'm on alert for mosquitoes.

-Right.

-[Rose] Okay.

-I mean, a researcher has called mosquitoes the deadliest animal on the planet.

-So I wanted to-- I mean, that's the antagonist, right?

-Mm-hmm.

Right.

-In the book is this invisible stalker that people in 1855 didn't even really know what they were running from.

But that makes it sort of more horrifying, I think, that they didn't know.

But I wanted to build that into it.

So, I did a lot of research on how this particular species, Aedes aegypti, also known as the yellow fever mosquito, behaves.

And how it attacks people.

And that, you know, in modern day, they'll come into your house and they'll hide behind a refrigerator, you know, until it's time to like swoop out and they come at you low and from behind -so they can't get slaughtered.

-Yeah, that was crazy reading that.

-They are really, really, you know, a vicious stinging machine.

-[Rose] And how they lay dormant for months-- -Right.

--and then, with the weather it just erupts.

-Right.

-That was fascinating too.

And I guess I didn't realize that only the females did the biting.

-Right.

I think women like to hear this.

-[Rose] Yeah.

-The males are really simple creatures -that just fly around.

-[Rose] [laughs] Definitely.

-Right?

They eat fruit nectar -[Rose] Mm-hmm and stuff like that and they don't really bother anybody.

The females, they have to bite and they have to have a mammal's blood because it makes their eggs that they're about to lay strong.

And they're all about making the species survive.

-And the other thing that surprised me was how many eggs that they could lay in places that you wouldn't even think that would be dangerous.

-Oh, it takes so, -so little water.

-[Rose] Yeah.

-And I've been at the top of a McAfee Knob and it will have rained, you know, a couple weeks earlier and there's just a little indentation in the rock.

And I look in there and now knowing what I know, -Yeah.

-I see mosquito pupae, you know, swimming around in there.

And way up, thousands of feet -in the mountains.

-[Rose] Yeah.

-And so, they can survive pretty much anywhere.

-That's a little bit scary.

But the other thing about the fact that this wasn't the first epidemic like this.

And yet, people didn't even really think about the mosquito.

It was always thought to be, well, if the males were feeding on the nectar, then maybe it was coming from fruit or maybe it was coming from bad air.

-Right.

-And how clever when you told us how they thought about bad air.

-Well, the idea was that a lot of times when the ship would come in, it would dump off anything that had rotted.

Epidemics passed.

And so, in 1793 in Philadelphia, there was a big outbreak that actually chased the president, Washington, Vice President Jefferson, the Continental Congress out of town that summer.

Killed 5,000 people.

And they thought that started from a ship having dumped rotting coffee on the wharf.

So, they thought it came from the bad smell.

And the term malaria, mal for bad air, that's where that comes from.

-Yeah, I never-- I'm reading that and I'm like, oh, my gosh, -I never knew that.

-Right.

-So, that's really interesting.

So, along your journey of collecting all of this information, you got a chance to meet with a woman who had looked into the research and had cataloged the research.

And you met her and had quite an interesting relationship to kind of put the book together.

Who was she and what did she do for the book?

-Well, when I found the first couple documents, they led me to other documents that I knew I wanted to find.

So, I called up the history room of the Norfolk Public Library and I said I'm looking for this document.

And the historian there who was there every day said, well, the archivist is here, would you like to speak to her?

And she's this seemingly very mild mannered yet determined woman.

And she picked up the phone and I said I'm looking for the writings of William Forrest.

And she just very, very softly said, you can find that on my website.

And then, I asked for another document and she just let me say it all, let me lay it all out.

And she said you can find that on my website.

[Rose chuckles] -And it turns out that about the time-- well, just before I started looking into this, she had started finding all original source documents that she could find and transcribing them and posting them on this publicly available website.

-[Rose] Mm.

-And she and I became, you know, friends down through the years because I had to call her or email her so many times.

But the interesting story about her is this-- a lot of this history would be gone without the work of the Norfolk Public Library having put Donna Bluemink onto the case.

And she went around and she found the plots in cemeteries where there was a name listed but there would appear to be no tomb there, no marker there.

And so, she took a shovel handle with a metal point on it and jabbed it into the ground.

And when it hit something solid, she knew she had to-- -uncover that area.

-Wow.

-And sometimes it would be four, six, eight inches underneath the sod.

-[Rose] Mm-hmm.

-And then she would uncover that marker, take a photograph of it, mark how you could go and find it and put it on her website.

-[Rose] Mm.

-So, she really-- she quite literally uncovered buried history.

-And actually it's because of her -that there's a memorial -Right.

-that exists today.

So, if people are traveling in that area to see really what happened and to understand what happened, to go there and to see the memorial.

You know, the references that you have in the back of the book for each chapter, you can tell how carefully researched and meticulous you were about making sure everything was right.

-Well, again, there was a lot of stuff to thread together to build this story.

-[Rose] Uh-huh.

-And I wanted people to be able to go back there and verify.

And if you want to go and find that document and find the part that I quoted or whatever, you can go and look it up yourself.

-Right.

And that's the newspaper and scientific eye in you.

How long did it take from when you first started writing it until getting it published?

-It took me about nine months to actually write the text of it.

It took me many more years to do the research.

-I'm sure.

So, that was a culmination of your series and working and meeting -and putting it all together.

-[Lon] Right, right.

-What still is the thing about the yellow fever and this whole story that still just kind of grabs you?

-Well, the story is, I think the thing that grabs you are some of the people.

And, you know, this city, these cities would have been crushed without outside help and without the people who sacrificed their lives who were not outside help.

They lived there and they decided to stay there with their families and risk their lives to help.

You know, in one case, a minister to help his flock and to help other people that weren't even in his church.

-Mm-hmm.

-And, you know, the young mayor who, Hunter Woodis, who stayed there and he was one of the few people at the time.

There was a lot of there was obviously a lot of discrimination of not just black people, but Irish people.

And he was a young Irish Catholic mayor.

And he sort of represented everybody, which was somewhat rare at the time.

And then the nurse, Annie Andrews, who came in from-- she lived in New Orleans, but she was visiting relatives in Syracuse, New York.

And she came down right away.

She said, I need to help these people.

And she risked her lives.

And she was upheld alongside in Harper's magazine, alongside Florence Nightingale two years later as a true modern heroine.

And so, I think it's really the characters that bring you along.

-I agree.

And, you know, the mosquito as a character, you know, for what happens is also something that permeates through the story.

So, if we think about the story, the Ben Franklins coming into port and Norfolk and Portsmouth are vibrant little towns and things are happening and shipping is happening back and forth.

And it's 1855.

And I didn't realize that the ship's captain lied to do whatever they could to unload their stuff and go back and forth.

So, as we open up the story, the Ben Franklin's coming into port, what's going on?

-Well, so they've come in and this is also bad luck for Norfolk and Portsmouth because the ship was supposed to go to New York.

But after it left the West Indies, along the way up the East Coast, it sprung a leak around the base of the mast.

And so, the captain enlists pass-- there were pleasure passengers on board.

He gets the male pleasure passengers down into the hold to help the crew pump as they go.

And they get about halfway up the coast and it becomes clear that they're not gonna make it.

So, he detours into Portsmouth.

Along the way also, unbeknownst to anybody, and they covered it up, somebody died of yellow fever, a young guy.

And they buried him at sea.

So, when the captain and the ship came in, they meet with the port's health officer, a doctor.

Say, what's your story?

Why are you here?

Oh, well, we've got this leak.

You've got to let us in.

-But everything else is okay.

-Right.

-So, they didn't tell the other part of the story.

-No, they didn't tell the other part of the story.

And they eventually got.

They had to sit in quarantine for a few days, but they eventually were allowed to come in to Portsmouth and get repaired.

And that was sort of the-- that was the match that lit the fuse.

-So, in that being the match that lit the fuse, did the ship have to stay there in quarantine for a period of days?

-So, I kind of skipped ahead.

It did have to stay in quarantine for 12 days.

And then, the captain subsequently, you know, lied again to be allowed to come in.

And then, when people off the ship started getting sick, the captain, they had a town meeting.

And then, everybody threw the accusations and the facts out there.

And they wrote a letter to the ship's owners in New York.

And the captain got dismissed.

-[Rose] Mm.

But actually, they're just guessing, right?

Because they didn't really know-- -[Lon] Right.

-if it was, like you said, the coffee or maybe it was a fruit or maybe it was bad air or this ship came from a tropical place or maybe it was through the enslaved people.

-Right.

-[Rose] I mean, - they were just guessing.

-Right.

-[Rose] So, what were some of the symptoms that let them know that, you know, this because they didn't-- did they have the term yellow fever yet?

-They had the term yellow fever -[Rose] Okay.

-because people turned yellow.

-[Rose] Exactly.

-You literally turned yellow when you have yellow fever because your liver shuts down.

-[Rose] Mm-hmm.

-Right.

-So, they noticed that each other starting to get sick, but then they quarantine people.

And you had mentioned how the one like the Irish were very discriminated against as long as-- as well as the enslaved people who were there doing it.

And so, then it became like the haves and the have nots.

So, people were stuck there.

They couldn't go.

But that wasn't the story for everybody, was it?

-No, the well-off and even people with a little bit of wherewithal, they got the heck out.

About 75% of the people in the two towns fled.

The very well-off led to, you know, past our area.

They went to Springs Resorts in western Virginia, some of which are now in West Virginia, but White Sulphur Springs and Red Sulphur Springs.

And they had a lovely summer out there.

And occasionally the collection plate would go around and they'd donate to their, you know, to the cause back in Norfolk.

But they didn't have to worry about it.

They were well fed.

They were having dances and, you know, hang out-- -[Rose] In the meantime, you know, it's total carnage -what's going on there.

-Right, right.

-And so, word got out from a reporter and he was undercover, right?

So he gave himself a pen name, which was?

-Verdad, the truth.

-[Rose] Yeah.

Uh-huh.

- Verdad, the truth.

-Yes.

-And so, they're getting information out that things are not going well and people are dying in extreme numbers or people are extremely sick.

Did they know why people might be immune or were they just still guessing?

-They had no idea.

They had no idea.

Although I'll say it was called in-- New Orleans was really a hotbed of yellow fever for many, many years.

And there they called it stranger's disease because they noticed that the newcomers in town a lot of times who would be Irish were more susceptible to yellow fever than others.

And in fact, they should have had a hint because enslaved people, this is horrible, but enslaved people who had had yellow fever in the past would be sold for a higher price than those who had not because they knew they were less likely -to become sick.

-[Rose] Oh.

Because they would have then had the immunity for it.

-Right, right.

-So, it's interesting.

So, money starts to pour in, but still they-- people are dying.

Families are being decimated.

One in three or about 3000 people perished.

-Yes.

-So, there's an interesting guy who is driving what we now know as a hearse, but a wagon.

And it had to be in your descriptions are amazing in the books where I feel like I'm sitting on the side of the road as he's collecting people.

Was it his cigar smoking or what do you think kept him healthy while he was constantly working with a sick people?

-So, John Jones was an enslaved man and he was assigned to go around and pick up the dead.

And he was, you know, apparently really a character of, you know, a common sight at that time on the horse with the wagon behind him.

And he was smoking usually a nine inch cigar, believed to be the smoke was keeping, you know, the mosquitoes away, probably.

And I don't know that I mentioned this, but he did get sick briefly and he recovered and came back and continued the task.

But often it was just John Jones and maybe one relative who would hoist the coffin or the body up into the back of the carriage.

And John Jones alone would ride off to the cemetery where the person would be buried, usually that afternoon, -usually within a couple hours, -[Rose] Yeah.

-because they didn't want to take -any chance on -[Rose] Sure.

-what a body might be.

-People were afraid and they were thinking they know how it was transmitted.

And you have the heroes that you mentioned earlier through the pastors, the clergy, the other people who came down.

And then, you know, they really didn't realize it was just the mosquitoes biting and biting and biting again.

Would you be willing to read something for us?

-Absolutely.

I want to put my glasses on to make it easier.

And this is from early in the book.

"The river was the spine between Norfolk and Portsmouth and ferry, steamers, fishermen and shipyard workers plied those waters days and night.

The Benjamin Franklin sat in quarantine at the point that was essentially the head of the spine.

And people on either shore could see at least a silhouette of whatever went on across that wide, calm harbor.

On the Norfolk shore, directly across from the Franklin, a man named William Harper and a crew worked every day to repair a revolutionary war station called Fort Norfolk.

As they worked, they warily watched the activity on the ship's deck.

After seeing a current of decaying oranges and bananas floating in the river, Harper and others paddled out to the Franklin, ostensibly to see if they could get some fruit before it all rotted.

"We'd like to speak to the first mate," Harper asked as they arrived.

"He's down with the fever."

Harper learned that the first mate wasn't the only one sick, and that was all he needed to hear.

He and the men nearly ran off the deck, paddled back to shore, and became obsessed with watching for any curious movement on the ship.

It didn't take long.

A few days later, they saw men laboring to drag a rolled mattress onto the deck, remove a corpse, and put it into a box.

They watched as the crew flung the mattress overboard, then moved to the far side of the ship.

Harper spotted a dinghy rowing towards the Portsmouth shore.

By then, more than rotten fruit was washing up at the fort.

First came a mattress, then a man's body.

The dead man was dressed as a coal heaver, or fireman, from the ship.

His face was mutilated, which Harper and his crew figured had likely happened in the river after he died.

The corpse had one more gravely disturbing characteristic.

His hands were as yellow as lemons.

A few evenings later, Harper's crew watched as two men came onto the deck at dusk, scurried one way and then another, then glanced around.

They raced towards the railing, then climbed over it.

Both hesitated.

Surely they wouldn't, Harper must have thought.

No sane person would jump into the Elizabeth River.

The cities built on opposite sides of the river had been making efforts to improve their cleanliness by sloping the streets to drain downhill.

All the garbage, horse manure, animal entrails, rotten food, and fetid ballast water from ships slid downhill into the river.

The salty water stunk like a pasture.

The men shinnied down the wooden sides of the Franklin and jumped in.

Harper and his crew dropped their shovels and hurried over to the river's edge.

They watched as one man's head popped up.

His arms flailed as he treaded water to locate the shore, then he started swimming.

They couldn't see the second man.

At last, a second silhouette bobbed above the surface, and both flailed their way toward the fort.

Harper and the crew swung into action.

For protection against the British, the military had built Fort Norfolk behind a high berm and seawall that swimmers couldn't breach.

As the men from the Franklin neared the shore, Harper's crew threw ropes over to them and winched them onto the berm.

They lay gasping.

The crew stood in quiet shock.

Then one spoke up.

Why did you risk your lives like that?

Better to chance drowning, one said, wheezing for air, than stay on the ship and face certain death."

-Wow.

Lon, you've covered such an important part of history by, you know, letting us know it was the most fatal plague in American history in this 100 days.

Thank you so much for inviting us here to your home and for sharing the fever with us.

Special thanks to Lon Wagner again for all of the tireless work he did to uncover and tell the story, the true story of the fever.

Make sure to check out more of our conversation online.

We're gonna talk more about the book and some more science and a little bit more about mosquitoes.

I'm Rose Martin.

Tell your friends about us.

And I'll see you next time Write Around the Corner.

♪♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday I write the book ♪ ♪♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday I write the book ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday (everyday) ♪ ♪ Everyday I write the book ♪ [narrator VO] This program is brought to you by the generous support of the Secular Society.

Advancing the interest of women in the arts in Virginia and beyond.