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The dying began on a Monday. By Saturday, Edward S. Bryant’s home in High Point felt like a morgue.

His daughter, Martha, died first. Then his wife, Chrissie. Then Bryant, a 55-year-old mechanic.

In six days, three members of the Park Street family succumbed to the most deadly plague in history — the 1918 influenza outbreak.

“It was the mother of all pandemics,” said Ward Robinson, medical director for the Guilford County Department of Public Health. “It shows us what nature can do — what havoc it can wreak.”

An estimated 50 million to 100 million died worldwide, including nearly 700,000 in the United States and more than 13,600 in North Carolina.

One report estimated that in a five-month period 1 million Tar Heels — more than a third of North Carolina residents — caught the flu as it swept across the state in three waves in 1918 and early 1919.

Many survivors reported that they had never been as sick before or since. Or as frightened.

“Since time began, there has never been so fearful, fatal and widespread a malady as this epidemic,” Greensboro resident Mary Kelly Watson Smith wrote in her diary in October 1918. “Influenza keeps on its deadly way .... Many sad deaths here and elsewhere.”

Now, the nation has braced for another flu outbreak. This time, it’s H1N1, or swine flu.

A recent White House reports says it “poses a serious health threat.” Fortunately, it should claim far fewer lives than in 1918, but could infect more people.

The report says as many as 120 million Americans could show flu symptoms. Such numbers would fill doctors’ offices and hospitals to capacity.

Today, doctors have a vaccine, medicines and intensive care units at their disposal. But in 1918, they had nothing.

“Doctors was all worried to death that people were dying everywhere,” James Pharis, of Eden, said in a 1978 oral history. “(They) said, 'We don’t know what to do.’ ”

The flu first appeared in early 1918, but the initial wave attracted little attention. That’s because it proved only slightly more deadly than the seasonal variety. All that changed in the fall.

The second wave began in late September and death rates began to soar. By early October, state and local officials realized the need for action.

On Oct. 4, state health officials urged communities to close schools and theaters and ban public gatherings, including worship services, weddings and funerals.

“Move promptly,” warned Dr. W.S. Rankin, the secretary of the State Board of Health. “Human life is at stake.”

People called the flu the blue death.

The virus caused severe pneumonia that quickly filled victims’ lungs with a bloody fluid and turned their skin a darkish blue.

The flu targeted the young and healthy. It produced a violent reaction in the victim’s immune system, which led to the disease being deadliest among those whose systems were the strongest.

Some victims died within 48 hours. Others lingered for days.

“It was a pretty gruesome death,” said Jim Leloudis, associate professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill. “It doesn’t take much imagination to think how terrible that death must have been, and how frightened people must have been.”

Health officials and newspapers tried to forestall a panic, often giving out misinformation.

“At best, they communicated half-truths, or even out-right lies,” John M. Barry, an author and historian, wrote in a paper on the flu in 2006. “As terrifying as the disease was, the officials made it more terrifying by making little of it, and they often underplayed it.”

That appeared to be the case in Greensboro.

Front page headlines in local newspapers, the Daily News and the Record, focused on the progress of World War I, not the flu, which ultimately killed more Tar Heels than the fighting in Europe.

On Oct. 13, the Daily News predicted there might be 1,000 flu cases in Greensboro and an equal number in Guilford County.

“While the outlook was darker yesterday than before,” the paper said that day, “it is pointed out there is no reason for any undue alarm.”

But the paper’s readers felt differently. Survivors talked about being afraid to leave their homes, associate with neighbors, or even breathe.

Mary Lewis Rucker Edmunds, whose family lived in the 300 block of North Elm Street, recalled that the epidemic reached “staggering proportions” in Greensboro.

In a 1993 book called Recollections of Greensboro, she recalled that the flu sickened her next door neighbor, Thomas Hunter, the founder of Pomona Mills.

“Every afternoon, my father would muffle his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and go to the Hunter residence to inquire about him,” Edmunds wrote. “The flu was so feared that passersby would cross the street and walk on the west sidewalk rather than walk in front of his house.”

Hunter died.

Obtaining accurate death tolls became an impossibility.

Most authorities today believe tallies were under reported because health officials were so busy treating the sick that they didn’t have time to provide precise numbers.

In Greensboro, federal mortality statistics show that 95 people died of flu and pneumonia in 1918. Most of those deaths came in the last three months of the year.

In Winston-Salem, the hardest hit town in the state, the death toll hit nearly 400.

In High Point, published accounts put the death toll in October and November at 54. The victims there included Mayor William P. Ragan, who died at his home on Oct. 13.

“No city, village or hamlet was spared,” wrote Annie Lee Stafford, a student at what is now UNCG. “ .... The newspapers’ obituary columns and the letters coming in (read) almost like the army casualty lists.”

So many people died that coffin makers in High Point and Burlington couldn’t keep up with the demand. In mid-October, Thomasville ran out of coffins and had four bodies awaiting burial.

A florist in Greensboro ran out of funeral flowers. Liquor stills ran full time as some believed alcohol helped treat the flu. The makers of Vicks VapoRub, a Greensboro product that some used to ward off the flu, ran ads apologizing because they couldn’t get supplies to druggists.

Businesses shut down or curtailed operations because of high rates of absenteeism. A mill in Burlington closed when only six out of nearly 100 employees showed up for work.

Doctors and nurses — many of their number had joined the war effort — couldn’t keep up as flu cases increased. Communities issued calls for medical help, but state officials had no one to send.

“The situation in the state is serious,” the State Board of Health said in an ad in the Daily News on Oct. 12. “Many people are dying for lack of attention.”
Others wrote friends asking for their prayers.

“It’s terrible,” Dan H. Graham, pastor at Camp Lee in Petersburg, Va., said in a letter to Greensboro residents. “ ... The Black Death of England was no worse than this .... Words cannot express the conditions .... One mother lost two sons yesterday in 30 minutes of each other.”

Army camps, mill villages and college campuses became breeding grounds for the flu.

In Stokesdale, C.G. Knight lost two sons in two weeks. Both died at Camp Jackson in South Carolina.

James E. Wood, who had been a member of the Student Army Training Corps at the University of North Carolina, wrote about the struggle in what is now Our State magazine in April 1990.

“The infirmary was filled with sick and dying boys,” Wood wrote. “Mothers came to Chapel Hill to nurse their sons and they died, too.”

So many died, survivors recalled, that graveyards looked like freshly plowed fields.

“The people lost faith in the remedies they had relied on all their lives and they became frantic,” wrote Selena W. Saunders, who inspected conditions in a North Carolina mill village. “Some of them locked themselves in their house and refused to open their door to anyone.”

Communities urged citizens to wear face masks, keep street car windows open, use only paper drinking cups, avoid shaking hands, keep their children close to home and stop spitting.

They set up emergency hospitals to treat the most critical cases and soup kitchens to prepare food for those who could not care for themselves. In some cases, entire families got sick.

“It got so bad, the fire department was designated as the headquarters for everything,” C.W. “Moon” Wyrick, a former fire chief, recalled in a 1969 story in the Record.

“Firemen filled the prescriptions, helped with the sick, made caskets, embalmed the dead and buried them. Sometimes as many as 18 a day died.”

By early November, the outbreak appeared to have passed. In Greensboro and many other localities, officials lifted the restrictions.

But then came the Armistice ending World War I, and people took to the streets, celebrating with parades and speeches.

Soon thereafter, more flu cases erupted and officials reinstituted the restrictions.

By early 1919, in most places, the flu had disappeared. Many figured it had consumed all the available victims it could consume.

So many people had died that life expectancy in 1918 fell by nearly 12 years.

“It was a terrible,” Nannie Pharis, the wife of James Pharis in Eden, recalled in an oral history. “It sure did thin out the population at that time.”

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com