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…