The memorial consists of an 8-foot marble monument that is located in the southeast corner of the cemetery. The memorial was dedicated by the City of Jacksonville Beach on June 17, 1979, in memory of the legendary victims of Yellow Fever 1888-1889.
The following information about the 1888-1889 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Jacksonville is from the
Orlando Sentinal website:
It was a terrible way to die: chills, followed by fever, then internal bleeding, and finally the black-bloody vomit that made neighbors flee and states post armed guards at their borders to keep the sick away.
Yellow fever. Yellow Jack. These were names for the disease that struck Jacksonville with such force in 1888 that the New York Times' front page reported it was "every one for himself."
Yellow Jack hit its victims indiscriminately and unpredictably. Some contracted just a touch of fever. Others suffered from an agonizing array of symptoms that left about 400 dead and more than 4,700 sick - about one-third of the estimated 14,000 people who did not flee Jacksonville in terror.
The disease had skipped through southern and eastern port cities for years, reaching as far north as Boston during the warm-weather months of the late 1800s. Jacksonville - which in 1888 was America's premier winter resort - is believed to have endured the state's biggest outbreak that year. Orlando, because of its inland location, was spared.
That yellow fever seemed to lack a cause added to the alarm, and governments, doctors and residents reacted with assorted folk remedies that did nothing to stop the deaths.
People burned tar fires to purify the air of "miasma" - germs thought to cause the disease. Guns thundered overhead as people shot weapons into the air to dislodge malignant germs. The guns fell silent only after a doctor who had advocated the benefits of "artillery concussion" caught the fever.
Hysteria spread through the state. The 1888 governor's race was disrupted because candidates had to wait 10 days to cross county lines so they wouldn't spread the fever. Commerce stopped as people spent all their money to leave Florida.
The only real advancement to emerge from the chaos was the Florida Board of Public Health. Shaken government officials realized they needed a central agency to coordinate control of future outbreaks, and began the department in 1889. The agency also kept statistics on the dead and sick because those figures were often incomplete and sometimes contradictory during 19th century epidemics.
The agency celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Though yellow fever was wiped out in the United States early this century with the discovery that it is spread by mosquitoes, the department continues to battle epidemics today, most notably AIDS. And because yellow fever still exists in many areas of the world, including Latin America, the disease that wreaked havoc in Florida just a century ago still lingers in the jungles just a few hundred miles away.
Those who saw the disease firsthand could not be detached in their accounts. For weeks the New York Times listed the day's dead and ill from Jacksonville on its front pages: "Infant of Mrs. Holland, two children of Sarah Williams, Jessie and Charlie Orlagus . . . "
On Sept. 8, 1888, it told the horror of the epidemic:
"Entire families have been swept out of existence by the plague. In others, a father or mother, or perhaps both are dead, leaving young children to the tender mercies of those who already perhaps have more grief than they can bear."
When yellow fever struck Jacksonville in late July of 1888, Joseph Porter, a physician from Key West, joined a local doctor in diagnosing the first case. Less than two weeks later, it was an epidemic.
Word of the fever sent residents fleeing town - to family and friends in Atlanta, North Carolina, New England and the Midwest. Yellow fever overlooked the class, race and sex distinctions so pronounced in 19th century Florida, inflicting every group in roughly equal proportions.
"There was no consistency. There was no explanation for it," said John Duffy, a medical historian and professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. "This was a very nasty way to die."
William Marvin, a U.S. district attorney in Key West, survived a Florida yellow fever outbreak. In his autobiography, Marvin wrote how he nearly died, but recovered, and thus became immune for life.
"I used to visit without fear or apprehension, the sick bed of many persons who were dying of this frightful disease," he wrote. "I came to the conclusion that medical treatment of any kind was of no value to either arrest, modify or cure the disease.
"Whenever it was an epidemic, full one-half of the adult patients died, and you could give no good reason why the other half did not die too."
Theories on the cause of contagious diseases gained prominence in the late 19th century, prompting Jacksonville health officials to try to eliminate the fever with disinfectant. They doused tree trunks, hitching posts and curbs with lime and fumigated street cars with a mercury solution.