There was no revelry in Harvard Oct. 31, 1756, the day Phebe Lawrence, 2½, Jonathan Crouch, 2½, and Huldah Hale, 7, died.
In fact, it had been a very bad fall. Earlier in October, three of Jonathan and Sarah Whitney’s children died within 10 days of each other. Harvard lost 11 children in September, 17 in October, and by the end of November, five more had passed away, including Jonathan Crouch’s older sister Mary and Phebe Lawrence’s infant sister Tryphena.
According to historian Henry Nourse in his 1894 History of the Town of Harvard, an epidemic of “endemic dysentery” swept Harvard in 1756, one of several epidemics of 18th-century New England. Also know as flux or “bloody flux,” endemic dysentery may have been typhoid or cholera. Diphtheria, influenza, measles, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and smallpox were also common threats to young children. Young adults frequently fell victim to pulmonary consumption.
From whatever the cause, 35 children and 8 adults died in 1756, twice the normal death rate. Nourse estimated Harvard’s population in 1746 at 600 and up to 1,126 by the 1767. If we guess a population of around 1,000 in 1756, 43 deaths represent 4.3 percent of the town. Sterling was hit even harder that year, when one in 20 died in the month of September alone.
Today, the loss of even one child in the community is a shock felt by everyone. It is difficult to imagine a time when surviving to 5 years old was in question. Some parents delayed naming their infants until they survived their first days or months.
The early records kept by the town minister do not list the causes of death so we cannot be certain what happened. Could Harvard men have brought home “camp fever” from the French and Indian War? Harvard sent more than 20 men to the fight, 13 of them on a 1755 expedition to capture Crown Point at the south end of Lake Champlain.
“Many soldiers enfeebled by camp diseases, died in the ill-appointed hospitals, or were brought home by short stages on horseback through the wilderness of Western Massachusetts,” wrote Nourse.
Harvard farmer Uriah Holt described his own journey home in 1756: “I was returning from said campaign when I was Taken Sik at the Hafe Moon & Lay there four days and then moved Homewards as fast as my strength would admit …after I got Home I was Confined to my Bead with the Camp fevour four wekes.”
Did the victims share anything in common? An 1831 map of Harvard that identifies family homes shows many of the family names of those who died clustered 80 years later in the southern and southeastern part of the town. Willard and Farnsworh homesteads occurred all over town, but only this area shows so many of the less familiar victims’ names that are not found elsewhere in town.
Death rates also spiked in 1736, 1747, 1756, and 1778, with childhood deaths most frequent in the spring or August through October. In 1778, 32 children died between August and November, possibly from the smallpox epidemics that swept Boston and other communities around this time, another wartime spread of disease.
Whatever struck the three children on All Hallow’s Eve 1756, and so many others that fall, had subsided by December, a quiet month with no recorded deaths. So ended 1756 in Harvard.