The earliest recorded outbreak of Yellow Fever in Alabama occurred in current-day Mobile at the colonial French settlement of Fort Louis de la Louisiane in 1704 and dictated much of the region’s history for nearly two hundred years after. Due to its status as a port city, the frequent travel through Mobile led to several epidemics of Yellow Fever and resulted in an abundance of deaths throughout the period. In an 1819 epidemic, nearly half of the population of the city died of the disease, an event that drove the city to open the now notorious Church Street Graveyard, Mobile’s oldest existing cemetery, in 1820.
Outside of just the imminent threat the disease posed, Yellow Fever also put a severe financial strain on citizens who were in need of care and created economic difficulties. In 1839, upon realizing the larger issues the disease posed for residents of the city a group of notable Mobilians banded together to create a philanthropic organization that they called the “Can’t Get Away Club,” to combat these issues. Named after the fact that they refused to leave the city during epidemics, the Club assisted struggling citizens with things like paying for doctors and nurses, arranging burials, facilitating grocery and supply deliveries, and creating employment for those who lost their jobs in the epidemic. For every epidemic after its inception, the Club banded together to help the citizens of Mobile. Though most of the Club’s members were some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the city, they were not allowed to receive any financial benefit from serving in the organization and functioned on a strictly charitable basis.
The last recorded case of Yellow Fever in the state of Alabama occurred in 1905 and after the last few outbreaks in Mobile passed in 1897, there was little need for the assistance of the Can’t Get Away Club. A 1908 article from The Mobile Daily Item details a meeting in which the Club’s then President Price Williams applauded their efforts and acknowledged that due to the threat of Yellow Fever having passed they would no longer be a necessary organization in the city of Mobile. When addressing his fellow “Can’t-Get-Away’s,” Williams said: “There is no further use for the members of this militant organization who tried to do for others what they could not do for themselves but they have the happiness of realizing they were of service to mankind and without any thought of reward or compensation.”…