La Fièvre Jaune: an Exhibition Plan on St. Patrick's Cemetery, Irish

University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring 5-23-2019 La Fièvre Jaune: An Exhibition Plan on St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Irish Immigrants, and the Role of the Catholic Church During the 1853 Yellow Fever Epidemic in New Orleans Katherine Vest [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation Vest, Katherine, "La Fièvre Jaune: An Exhibition Plan on St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Irish Immigrants, and the Role of the Catholic Church During the 1853 Yellow Fever Epidemic in New Orleans" (2019). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 2651. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2651 This Thesis-Restricted is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). 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La Fièvre Jaune: An Exhibition Plan on St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Irish Immigrants, and the Role of the Catholic Church During the 1853 Yellow Fever Epidemic in New Orleans A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History by Katherine Vest B.A. Truman State University, 2017 May, 2019 Table of Contents Illustrations ....................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iv Project Overview .................................................................................................................1 Historical Context ...............................................................................................................2 A Global History of Yellow Fever...........................................................................2 “The Stanger’s Disease” in New Orleans ................................................................4 Catholic Cemeteries and Yellow Fever ..................................................................7 Review of Literature ...........................................................................................................9 Methodology .....................................................................................................................13 Design ...............................................................................................................................14 Impact ...............................................................................................................................18 Audience ...........................................................................................................................19 Bibliography .....................................................................................................................20 Appendices ........................................................................................................................21 Appendix A: St. Patrick Cemetery 14th July – August 1853 .............................. 21 Appendix B: Statistics of St. Patrick Cemetery yellow fever deaths .....................67 Appendix C: Exhibit Prospectus ...........................................................................68 Vita .....................................................................................................................................70 ii Illustrations Tables List of burials in St. Patrick Cemetery, July – August 1853............................................. 21 Statistics of St. Patrick Cemetery yellow fever deaths ......................................................67 Images Interpretive Panels, La Fièvre Jaune ....................................................................... 15 - 17 Song of Farwell, Exhibit prospectus ................................................................................ 68 iii Abstract The proposed public history project, La Fièvre Jaune, will be one component of a larger exhibit sponsored by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Office of Archives and Records entitled Song of Farewell: Catholic Cemeteries of New Orleans, focusing on New Orleans’s historic Catholic cemeteries, funeral chapels, relics, and burial rights. Using cemetery and death records, La Fièvre Jaune documents many of the Catholic, largely Irish immigrants struck by yellow fever in 1853 and the role of St. Patrick’s cemetery as the burial site for this population. The epidemic took the lives of some 8,000 people. This project will provide insight into the ways that the Catholic Church in New Orleans responded to the 1853 yellow fever epidemic using photographs, official correspondence, as well as cemetery and death records. The entire exhibit will be housed at the Old Ursuline Convent Museum in the French Quarter. Keywords: Catholic Church; yellow fever; epidemic, Irish immigration; St. Patrick’s Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana, Irish Channel iv Project Overview Drawing upon Catholic cemetery records overlooked by many historians, La Fièvre Jaune documents the effects of the yellow fever epidemic of 1853 on the Catholic immigrant population of New Orleans. The epidemic, one of the city’s worst, struck New Orleans in May of 1853, taking the lives of some 8,000 residents, many of them newly arrived Irish immigrants of the Catholic faith.1 The exhibit will focus primarily on the Irish immigrants buried in St. Patrick Cemetery No. 1. It will also make available and easily searchable, for the first time, the names of those who died of the fever and were buried in St. Patrick’s cemetery, located northwest of the French Quarter on Canal Street. [See Appendix] The exhibit space will supplement these records and the stories they contain with archival visual material and excerpts from firsthand accounts. La Fièvre Jaune is the first such project to draw upon the records of St. Patrick’s Cemetery. It is significant that the St. Patrick No. 1 cemetery records are the only cemetery records for that time period that state the cause of death. Yet because the records are incomplete—most likely because records keepers had difficulty keeping pace with the large number of deaths in such a short period—historians have largely overlooked them as a source for information about the outbreak. Nonetheless, there is still much that can be gleaned from the St. Patrick’s cemetery records at the Archdiocese of New Orleans, including racial, ethnic, and demographic information about the deceased, the rate of death according to age and gender, and the extent of the responsibilities of Catholic clergy and officials to the Irish immigrant community. 1 Yellow fever epidemics claimed the lives of almost 41,000 people throughout the 109 years it impacted New Orleans. New Orleans Public Library, Yellow Fever Deaths in New Orleans, 1817-1905, Accessed March 3, 2019. http://nutrias.org/facts/feverdeaths.htm 1 Historical Context Global History of Yellow Fever Yellow fever’s spread to the Americas is a product of Atlantic slavery and global trade. The yellow fever virus is spread by Aedes aegypti, a specific type of mosquito of West African descent, known as A. aegypti. Today, the disease is still affecting parts of South America and Africa, with Central America, South America, and sub-Saharan Africa most affected. The majority of twenty-first-century cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa because of the poor sanitary conditions there. In 2018, the World Health Organization reported that “thirty-two African countries are now considered at risk of yellow fever, with a total population of 610 million people, among which more than 219 million live in urban settings.”2 As populations grow, sanitary conditions deteriorate, and the disease re-emerges in other areas of the world. Today, yellow fever kills 30,000 people globally each year and is still a serious public health issue in many cities and towns around the world.3 Yellow fever remains an important aspect of history, but it is crucial to remember that these epidemics are not merely something of the past. The first documented case of yellow fever in the Western Hemisphere, a consequence of the trade in African people to the Caribbean, occurred in Barbados in 1647.4 During the late 1600s, yellow fever was sporadic throughout the Caribbean. For instance, historians recount the death of colonial troops on the island of St. Lucia: “In 1665, a British squadron noted to be in good health, seized St. Lucia. A garrison of fifteen hundred troops placed on the island was 2 “Yellow fever: a current threat,” World Health Organization, accessed November 15, 2018, https://www.who.int/csr/disease/yellowfev/impact1/en/. 3 Yellow Fever,” The History of Vaccines, accessed November 15, 2018, https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/yellow-fever. 4 Benjamin H. Trask, Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796 - 1905, (Lafayette: University of

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