Malaria in Newark Brings a Family to Glenside Park, The Deserted Village Turned Resort

MALARIA IN NEWARK BRINGS A FAMILY TO GLENSIDE PARK, THE DESERTED VILLAGE TURNED RESORT

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I well remember my excitement upon first seeing the original letters of Anna Molloy Walsh in the collections of the New Providence Historical Society, at the Society’s former headquarters in a little house on Springfield Avenue in New Providence. It was an intense feeling, that ability to touch something written by one of the people I considered my Deserted Village characters. James Hawley, author of the last book which had been written about the village, titled The Deserted Village and The Blue Brook Valley,¹ had donated all his research papers to the Society, including Anna’s letters, written when she was 84. This project has not always afforded me the opportunity to find primary sources directly related to the village, so having letters that described how Anna got to the village and what happened while she and her family were there were—and are—an amazing joy. I always compare the effort it requires to research my “village characters,” perhaps unfairly, with the imagined research into someone like Alexander Hamilton, who left shelves of papers. Of course, that amount of material presents a whole different kind of problem.

Anna’s letters contained a reference to a disease I had never imagined as being in New Jersey or even the United States:

At age eighty four and six months I look back with a great deal of pleasure on my young life spent at Glenside Park [Feltville/Deserted Village]—I was a delicate baby and my parents moved from Newark, N.J. where I was born on North Fifth Street—about four blocks from the Morris Canal which was used in those years to bring mostly coal from Penn—used mules to draw the canal boats. I developed malaria. Our doctor said if they wanted to raise me, they must take me out to the country. Father’s circumstance was modest—so that became the question—

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Our doctor’s sister had been a friend of my grandmother . . . Doctor took it up with Mrs. Halstead whose husband General Halstead had been in business with Mr. Ackerman during the Civil War—had a factory in Elizabeth and did government work. The title “General” was a complimentary one for his wonderful work in supplying the government with boots, blankets, saddles, etc—

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The General contacted his former friend and secured a job for father.²

Malaria! I had always thought of malaria as a disease of faraway tropical areas. After seeing Anna’s letter about being so sick that her parents needed to remove Anna and themselves from Newark for her to have a chance to grow up, I knew I needed to track down the story of malaria in Newark.

In the end, I consider Anna lucky to have “only” contracted malaria, since there were so many other things in her birth city that she could have been infected with, and which might have killed her before she had a chance to leave the city with her family. This post, then, will delve into malaria, and also into the conditions in Newark in the late nineteenth century. Looking at Newark’s conditions is not only important because of Anna, but because many—and in some summers, most—of Glenside Park’s guests were from Newark. I immediately felt that their trip to Glenside might be, in part, a way to escape the potentially lethal conditions of Newark.

Along the way both the topics of malaria and of Newark have come to seem very personal to me, without my knowing exactly why. I have to give a shout out to scholar Stuart Galishoff, who wrote a book about Newark’s late nineteenth century conditions, called Newark, the Nation’s Unhealthiest City. I now own my own copy, one that was discarded by a library in Arizona. I am angry on the author’s part that the library did not view the book as the essential and enduring reference I see it as. Sometimes I feel that part of my mission is to introduce my readers to books that are immensely well written and cover important but largely unknown topics. There are a number of authors whom I would love to meet just so they know that a fan of their work exists out here.

So, just as she did for me, I will let Anna Molloy Walsh take us first into a study of malaria, in particular malaria in Newark, New Jersey, at a time when disease was literally around every corner. I will also let Anna take us into the story of malaria beyond Anna and Newark, to its virtual eradication in the United States. I was shocked to find out the role of DDT in this—as a child who had grown up with the lessons of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I had difficulty seeing DDT as an acceptable solution ever.

And I will explain why I think Anna may have been lucky to “only” contract malaria, by describing what made Newark of her time so unhealthy.

MALARIA, THE DISEASE

As explained by Margaret Humphreys in her book Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, malaria is a name given to four different diseases, caused by four different mosquito-delivered parasites, that belong to one genus, Plasmodia.³ Humphreys identifies the two dominant parasites observed in America as falciparum and vivax. Both of these cause splitting headaches and intermittent fevers, generally on a forty-eight-hour cycle—indeed, it is the intermittent character of the fevers which often allows doctors to distinguish between malaria and other fever causing illnesses such as typhoid fever, which cause a more continuous fever.

Of the four kinds of malaria, falciparum has the most severe impacts on the body, causing abdominal cramping, diarrhea, and vomiting. It can also cause enlargement of the liver and spleen. Once a certain level of this parasite is reached, small arteries may become clogged, leading to coma, and possibly, death. Children infected with this disease may go into sudden seizures after seeming well only hours before.

One of the chief dangers of malaria is that infection is not necessarily one and done—that is, a victim who is living in an area where the mosquito responsible for transmission is prevalent may be bitten multiple times and thus receive multiple infectious doses of the parasite. This can exacerbate the impacts of infection and make it more likely that areas of the body already affected during initial infection, such as an enlarged spleen, may become permanently damaged, and the individual may remain partly incapacitated his or her entire life. However, any malaria victim, whether infected only once or more than once, may suffer relapses periodically during their lifetime. At least in the present day, malaria can be totally cured with anti-malarial drugs, if diagnosed and treated early.⁴ It is not so clear this was true during Anna’s time.

All four parasites are dependent for transmission on one kind of mosquito, the anopheles.⁵ The adult female anopheles is responsible for transmission of the disease, which she does as a side effect of her need for blood meals from humans or other vertebrates. Without the resulting iron and protein from the blood she drinks, she is unable to produce eggs. The female generally needs multiple bites to accumulate the amount of blood needed to allow egg production, but once she has done so, she can lay hundreds of eggs. During these multiple bites and blood extractions, the mosquito may bite an infected animal and receive the sexual forms—gametocytes—of the malaria parasites along with her meal. The male and female gametocytes mate in the mosquito’s stomach, and in the process of growing inside the mosquito, burrow into the stomach and end up in the salivary gland as what Humphreys calls “a long ribbon form called a sporozoite.”⁶ This sporozoite gets injected into the next animal or human bitten by the female, infecting that individual with malaria.

Only the adult females drink blood. Both adult sexes drink flower nectar or fruit juices; adult males do not actually have a proboscis which is strong enough to pierce through skin for blood. Adult male mosquitoes spend much of their time hovering around water bodies for an opportunity to mate with females, and tend to live for a shorter time than adult females.

Indeed, the anopheles mosquito, like other mosquitoes, relies on standing water as a place to incubate larvae. The female mosquito lays masses of eggs into standing water, preferring the shallow edges of waterbodies, or other locations where the water remains still and the eggs undisturbed. These portions of e.g. wetlands may also be hosting plants which provide cover and protection for the larvae as they emerge, and algae or other microorganisms or floating organic matter which the larvae need as food. The mosquito larvae pass through a subsequent pupal stage while still in the water, then emerge as adults. Depending on whether conditions are optimal, including the right amount of heat, etc., the egg to adult life cycle may take days or weeks.

In a climate such as New Jersey, with the cold weather of winter, the malarial parasite generally dies over the winter, and mosquitoes must bite infected organisms in order to start transmission and the whole life cycle of the parasite over again, as the weather warms.

THE ORIGIN OF MALARIA IN THE UNITED STATES

Are the malaria parasites native to the United States? Humphreys cites evidence that suggests that this disease was not originally endemic to this country.⁷

Humphreys believes that the chief evidence is the lack of genetic protection markers among the indigenous populations in North America. People in Africa and other parts of the world where malaria had been known for centuries had already evolved blood abnormalities that made them totally or partly resistant to at least some strains of malaria. America’s indigenous people did not appear to have developed this resistance, suggesting the disease was one of those brought with colonizers. Humphreys sees evidence that there may have been various outbreaks of malaria among natives before the expeditions of Columbus, outbreaks which may have been caused by pre-Columbian contact with “Vikings, Arabs, or Asians” crossing to the Americas. She is able to state with more certainty that Europeans brought malaria to the Americas after 1492. Although she concludes that malaria was another of the many diseases brought here which killed Native Americans, she does not think that malaria was among the most lethal among the silent holocaust of disease which eradicated so much of the native population, noting that the most devastating were smallpox and measles.

After 1492, malaria was repeatedly introduced anew to the Americas by enslaved Africans who carried one or more of the parasites, but had partial or complete immunity, as well as by others traveling from various European countries who were carrying the parasites.⁸ Mosquitoes here bit these travelers, thus starting the life cycle of the parasites here. Jamestown experienced an outbreak soon after colonization, and by 1750, forms of the disease had spread across the Americas.

WHAT THE U.S. DID TO CONTROL MALARIA

Just as stunning to me as the fact that malaria was a factor in local and national history, is the history of what measures have been taken to try to eradicate it. As someone raised on the history of Rachel Carson and the legacy of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), I was shocked to find out that it was DDT—including DDT sprayed on the inside walls of homes—which was used to provide control.

 

In research for this post, I discovered that New Jersey was ahead of the curve in studying mosquitoes and how to get rid of them. Research on mosquitoes was spearheaded here by New Jersey’s second State Entomologist, John B. Smith, who took office under the auspices of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES) in 1889. He was a self-trained entomologist who devoted a bit more than his first decade of service to collecting and studying insects which were harming New Jersey crops. During this time, he initiated both a system of inspection of nurseries and a system of bee inspection, to reduce the transmission of pests and diseases in those two arenas.

In 1901, he began studying mosquitoes in earnest, promising that “inside a decade, New Jersey mosquitoes [would be] reduced to a point as to be practically unnoticed.”⁹ In the same year, the New York Times described his mosquito research in a article:

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In his laboratory Prof. Smith has a veritable mosquito ranch. By breeding he can raise any kind of a mosquito from the smallest to the largest. His specimens are in glass tumblers with netting hoods over them. The tumblers are ranged side by side on a shelf, and show how the insect gets larger the further south in the State he lives.¹⁰

 

Photographs from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an open access digital library headquartered at the Smithsonian Library and Archives, from John B. Smith’s Report to the New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment Station Upon the Mosquitoes Occurring within the State, their Habits, Life History, & c. online and in the public domain HERE.

 

At the time of the article, Smith was in the process of requesting information from individual cities in the eastern part of the state about the “malarial districts” within their boundaries. He planned to use the responses of individual municipalities to determine the best ways to eliminate the threat of malaria in each community.

The following year, Smith was granted $10,000 in funding from the State Legislature to conduct a more complete study of disease-causing mosquitoes, including malarial mosquitoes, and methods of control. It appears that the state Appropriations Committee neglected to include the money in the budget, so the Governor gave Smith $1000 from his emergency budget, and the following year, another $9000 was allocated by a developing industry organization (whose name at that time is not fully clear); this money was particularly aimed at study of the mosquito in New Jersey’s Monmouth County.

Smith wrote a book about mosquitoes in 1904, Report to the New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment Station Upon the Mosquitoes Occurring within the State, their Habits, Life History, &c., which the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection credits with influencing state legislation in 1906 and 1912, “leading to statutory mosquito control in each county.”¹¹

After Smith’s death in 1912, Dr. Thomas J. Headlee became the State Entomologist.¹² He determined that mosquitoes could breed in any part of a salt marsh (such as those near Newark). Efforts at ditching and ditch cleaning to reduce standing water were undertaken. Extra manpower for these efforts was provided by the advent of the Public Works Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s—a boon, since effective machines for this work had not yet been perfected.

Headlee also participated in work to identify effective pesticides to control the malarial mosquitoes (and others). New Jersey was among the first states to test the control power of an application of a new pesticide, DDT, on the interior walls of a home, apparently in the 1940s.

Headlee’s tests came at the beginning of a nationwide campaign to control malaria using DDT. This campaign initially grew not out of the incidence of disease here in the US, but among American soldiers fighting in the Second World War. Humphreys cites to reports which called malaria the “#1 disease of World War II.”¹³ This was particularly true in the Pacific region and Africa and Italy, where malaria was credited as being instrumental in causing “the fall of Bataan and in other early war disasters.” The Malaria Control in War Areas agency (MCWA) was created. The campaign came home to the United States along with the soldiers who were bringing it home with them. The MCWA and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which developed around the same time malaria looked to a new wonder-pesticide both at home and abroad.

DDT was developed by a Swiss chemist working for Geigy and was quickly christened “the atomic bomb of the insect world,”¹⁴ clearly meant as a compliment. DDT not only killed a host of bothersome insects immediately but could be counted on to continue killing for several months in locations where it was sprayed. As noted, the campaign which developed in the United States involved spraying on the internal walls of houses. This was combined in many places with a program of outdoor fogging. My friend Fran, a few years younger than myself, remembers herself and other children delightedly running through the spray of the fogging truck, in the early 1960s when her family was living at Fort Bragg, South Carolina, just outside Fayetteville.¹⁵

RACHEL CARSON MAKES DDT A BAD WORD

DDT became available for civilian work in 1945.¹⁶ Sometime later, already best-selling author Rachel Carson was contacted by a friend from Massachusetts who was concerned about bird kills after outdoor fogging applications of DDT. This increased Carson’s concern about the impacts of DDT and other chemical pesticides coming into use. Despite opposition, Carson spent 4 years doing meticulous research and wrote Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. The book included DDT among various pesticides for which Carson presented the evidence of both environmental harm and the development by the targeted insect pests of resistance to each pesticide in turn, which made the pesticide less effective. In describing the research concerning the impacts of DDT, Carson called on scientific evidence which showed that DDT was entering and accumulating in the fatty tissues of animals up the food chain from the targeted insects. The animals up the chain, including humans, could develop cancer and genetic damage.

The book caused a sensation. The chemical companies producing the pesticides, including Dupont, attacked it. Carson had done her work so thoroughly and lined up so many scientists and other prominent people as supporters that the book survived all attacks. The book helped make people everywhere aware of how human activity impacted the natural world—and ourselves, as part of that world. It is credited with spurring a broader environmental movement for the country. That, in turn, led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, six years after Carson died of cancer.

DDT became personal to many of us when we learned that it was endangering eagles, by making the shells of their eggs so fragile that they would break when the parent tried to incubate them. EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT in 1972.¹⁷

THE UNDERSTANDING OF DISEASE AT THE TIME ANNA GOT SICK

Of course, when Anna got sick, the development of DDT was far in the future. Indeed, even the link to a microscopic organism as the cause of her disease, and to the mosquito as the vector carrying the microorganism had not been established. We don’t know what Anna’s doctor believed was the cause of her malaria, but it was unlikely that he thought she had caught it from mosquitoes.

The term malaria is from two Italian words meaning bad air, mala aria, shortened into one word. The term seems to harken to a medical theory, i.e. the miasma theory, which preceded the current universally accepted “germ theory” of infectious disease. The miasma theory held that disease was created by something in the atmosphere, such as the “miasmas” caused by rotting garbage or poorly treated sewage. In her book, The Gospel of Germs, Dr. Nancy Tomes, Tomes doesn’t reference the miasma theory by name, but instead speaks of the zymotic theory, which she describes as a theory that “disease agents were chemical ferments produced by decaying filth, and that they could generate spontaneously given the right atmospheric circumstances.”¹⁸ Galishoff (who doesn’t mention a zymotic theory) indicates that the belief in the miasmas creating disease “held sway” until the 1890s. In a sense, this theory also often reflected a belief that the filthy conditions which the poor were thought to live in created the miasmas which led to disease; that they were somehow contributing to their own illness.

Tomes explains that germ theory, on the other hand, credits pathogenic microorganisms as creating infectious diseases; these microorganisms are together commonly known as germs, although they include a range of organism types. Similarly, the “germs” are transmitted in a variety of ways, many through exposure to fecal matter containing the germs which had intruded into drinking water. Thus, the role of filthy living conditions—which the poor or working class often had no way to remedy or avoid—did indeed contribute to disease.

With other diseases, like malaria, the “germs” were transmitted, as has been described above, by another living vector such as the mosquito. In the 21^st century, especially in the wake of the Covid pandemic, we are particularly sensitive to the notion of real but unseen dangers, and the need to practice hygienic practices to prevent infection. Other prevention measures we practice now are inoculations (not as universally accepted as the invisible germs, but inoculations actually precede the development of the germ theory) and the control of vectors, including the use of barriers such as window screens.

Window screens! Numerous sources suggest that window screens did not begin to gain widespread use and acceptance until the 1880s. Tomes indicates that as of the 1880s, “Anglo-American physicians” were still resisting acceptance of germ theory. Anna’s home in Newark likely did not have window screens to keep mosquitos out. But without an understanding of the role of the mosquito, her doctor would not have tied the lack of screens to her disease. Indeed, most people at that time would not be suspecting mosquitoes of being anything other than an itchy annoyance, and they would have seen no pressing need for window screens. It does appear that wealthier individuals were installing window screens earlier to exclude mosquitoes, flies, and other insects.

Crusades to put screens in the windows of every house were prompted not by a desire to exclude mosquitoes, but by the discovery, under the auspices of germ theory research, that houseflies could carry the tubercle bacillus on their feet.¹⁹

At about this time, scientists discovered that they could culture tubercle bacillus from house dust. This led to greater emphasis on keeping the home free from dust and dirt; it apparently was used to prolong the notion that poor people living in supposed filth were promoting their own lack of health.

Although the identification of microorganisms as causative factors in disease and the medical and sanitation changes this understanding led to has clearly helped save lives, Galishoff has the following observation: “Historians of medicine generally agree that the contribution of modern medicine to the decline in mortality rates in the Western world has been much smaller than most people believe. The life expectancy of persons in the West, especially children, has increased mainly because living conditions have improved.”²⁰ These improved living conditions include access to adequate amounts of better food, as well as developments in food safety, including pasteurization and refrigeration. It also includes safe water and sanitary disposal of wastes.

WHY NEWARK MATTERS TO GLENSIDE PARK, THE RESORT

As I said above, I believe that Anna’s being infected with malaria may have been fortuitous, because, as a result, her family made arrangements to leave the city. They perhaps thought they were escaping bad air, but in reality, they were escaping a whole host of conditions in Newark, and with those conditions, many other diseases which could have ended Anna’s young life.

I have come to think of the City of Newark, New Jersey as one of the characters in my telling of the history of the Deserted Village, and perhaps that is why it has become so personal to me. Over the years many of the village’s human characters lived there. Warren Ackerman spent much of his young life there and suffered the death of his beautiful sister there. Thomas Moran, whom I have profiled in an earlier post, lived for a number of years in Newark; he arranged a working vacation during part of one summer at Feltville, some years before Warren Ackerman bought the place.

Newark is particularly relevant to my ongoing story of the resort era—the Deserted Village converted into Glenside Park—because Newark was the home city of many of the guests. I have come to believe that getting out of the city, particularly in the summer, could mean the difference between life and death. I believe the very numbers of Newarkers among those who came to the resort bears this out.

Evidence of the Newarkers at Glenside escaping the city comes, first, from a list of guests that Anna remembered at the resort and gave to James Hawley.²¹ Of the fourteen individuals she listed, nine were from Newark (or at least had their primary business in Newark), 4 were from New York, and one had no home location identified.

The tally from Anna’s list demonstrating a preponderance of Newark guests at Glenside Park is further confirmed in an article in The New York Herald, already excerpted in a previous post. The article identifies Glenside Park during the summer of 1893 as being a “colony” “composed of Newarkers and their families. The list seems to include some rather prominent people: Judge David A. Depue, Major General Joseph W. Plume, Ernest F. Munn, Uzal McCarter, John C. Downey, William H. Peck, Alfred Ayers, William Osborn. Sydney Ogden and John A. Miller. ²² The article notes that “The only one in the colony who is not a Newarker is William Pinto, of Brooklyn.”

THE TWO SIDES OF LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY NEWARK

What was Newark like in the late nineteenth century when Glenside Park was receiving many of its guests from there? It was, among other things, a place of culture and opportunity, the home of many prominent New Jerseyans, including those named above as guests of Glenside Park. Much of the economic opportunity arose out of the many factories and other industries in the city. In 1860, Newark was the largest industrially based city in the country,²³ and prided itself on its business-friendly climate, and on the number of businesses and businessmen it had attracted. This, in turn, provided almost infinite opportunity for the scores of Irish and German immigrants arriving in need of work.

But along with opportunity came health hazards, especially for the immigrants and the poor. At the end of the nineteenth century, about three of every ten children in Newark died before reaching their first birthdays. In his 1966 book, Newark, John T. Cunninham sums up Newark’s issues—and eventual transformation—during the time period that it was sending vacationers to the Deserted Village.

The United States Census of 1890 revealed a shocking fact: Newark had the highest death rate among all the twenty-eight cities in the United States with populations of more than 100,000. The city’s death rate had even become a factor in politics, and in 1883 a Democratic sweep was attributed largely to a decline in public sanitation under Republican rule … By 1910, Newark, which twenty years before had the nation’s highest death rate, stood sixth among cities with the lowest rates.²⁴

Cunningham’s book provides a chapter of detail regarding Newark’s late nineteenth-century health conditions, but it is author Stuart Galishoff who provides us with a truly in depth look into what gave the city its reputation as “the nation’s unhealthiest city” of the time, in his book, Newark, the Nation’s Unhealthiest City. He also details the way that the city’s unhealthy status was unnecessarily prolonged by the city’s resistance to spending the money to improve health conditions. As Newark’s relative standing among American cities began to drop after 1860, even though business continued to expand and thrive in the city, those in power grew increasingly obsessed with keeping Newark business-friendly. This was prioritized over the lives of the poor and working class.

AN IDYLLIC VIEW OF NEWARK

Gustav Kobbé offers us a snapshot of the culture and opportunity side of the Newark of this time in his 1890 guidebook titled The Central Railroad of New Jersey. His goal with the entry concerning the City of Newark is clearly not to characterize it as a vacation destination, but rather an attractive residential option. Newark gets one of the longest write ups of any town covered in Kobbé’s book.²⁵

Newark, at the time of Kobbé’s book, had a population of 170,000, having risen to that population from a population of 8,017 in 1826. Kobbé describes it in glowing terms:

. . . “Newark with its . . . vast industrial interests, which make it the ninth manufacturing centre of the country, its broad avenues, fine residential streets and, above all, its modern, progressive spirit, is the most important suburb reached by the Central Railroad of New Jersey.”²⁶

Kobbé tells us “the story of Newark is one of adventure in the founding and developing of useful arts.” Kobbé lists the following industries in Newark:

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Brass goods. Fourteen breweries. Brewers supplies. Brick. Carriages and carriage ornaments. Acids. Corsets. Curled Hair. Pins. Thirteen Leather Manufactories. Four Paper Box Manufactories. Cement. Celluloid Goods. Harness Trimmings. Bottles. Oil. Filterers. Steel and Iron. Varnish. Zin Oxide. Wagon Springs. Corliss Engines and Machinery. Three Large Fertilizer and Bone Black Manufactories. Barrels. Furniture. Bicycles. Binder Board. Blue Stone Works. Boilers. Boots and Shoes. Manufacturers’ Supplies. Wooden Boxes. Printing Presses. Sash and Blinds. Thread. Tinware. Tobacco. Tools. Water Motors. Hardware. Cigars. Macaroni.²⁷

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Kobbé describes the residential and retail areas of Newark in glowing terms as well:

The main business artery is Broad street, which has a width of 120 feet. This street was laid out by the original settlers. On it are large retail and wholesale stores of every description, Newark being the great shopping center for many towns and villages in Essex and Morris counties, enjoying also a large wholesale trade in the same localities. Market street is another important business thoroughfare.

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The residential and business and manufacturing portions of Newark are beginning to be better defined. Of late large residential districts have sprung up on the ridge which rises a little west of Broad street, and runs clear through the city north and south. . . . On the plain which extends from the foot of the ridge to the Passaic are most of the numerous factories which have made Newark wealthy and famous, and the principal business streets. There are, however, on the low-ground, several spots distinguished for fine residences. These are Broad street, near Lincoln Park, Park place, facing Military Park, and Washington place and street, facing Washington Park. The houses on these sites are mostly broad and spacious. . . These fine residences and numerous others of more modern proportions belong to people who have business as well as family interests in Newark, are thoroughly identified with the city’s progress, and are proud to hail from it. Herein Newark differs from those suburbs whose population is composed chiefly of New York business men. Within its boundaries many fortunes have been amassed, and it offers as attractive a field as ever for investment; business and professional men find ample employment; and there is steady demand for labor. Hence the vast majority of its residents are Newarkers in fact as will as in name. Newark is, however, also a pleasant dwelling place for New York business men, because of its accessibility, its own attractiveness, and the inexpensiveness of living there. Yet it offers all the conveniences of a city—electric light, gas, drainage, water-works, public buildings and institutions, churches, theatres, banks, insurance companies, newspapers and store.

Real estate values listed by Kobbé for Newark are among the highest for all the locations Kobbé listed along the route of the Central Railroad. “Building Lots” range from $500 to $3,000, equaled only by values for “Building Lots” at Lake Hopatcong. Factory sites cost $2000 and up. Only Plainfield has factory sites costing more than $2000, listed at a straight $3000. Clearly Newark was a desirable place to build a home or business.

“Modern Newark,” as described by Kobbé had a multitude of railroad stations. Kobbé singles out one of those on the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the one at “Broad street²⁸ (between Mechanic and Fair streets), opposite City Hall, a short distance from the Court House and Post Office,” and calls it the “most centrally located railroad station in Newark.” The Central Railroad was presumably sponsoring the guidebook which bore its name, after all. Newark also had four stations on the Pennsylvania Railroad, one on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, two on the Newark and Paterson Railroad, and two on the New York and Greenwood Lake Railroad. So, the city was well connected, transportation wise.

Kobbé mentions only one restaurant, “G. Munzer & Co., one door north of Broad street station, Central Railroad Co. of New Jersey.”

Newark’s Free Public Library is described in detail—apparently the building had been opened only the year before, with 10,000 volumes, but its main library room “will accommodate 200,000 volumes.”

The building, of granite, with halls and stairways in marble, is one of the finest structures in the State . . . There are, besides the catalogue room, with printed catalogues arranged according to subjects on tables and card catalogues in desks arm-high around the room, a reference library, a prettily-furnished reading-room for women, a main reading-room, and a class-room to be used by children of the public schools brought thither by their teachers.

For library card members:

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Books may be kept two weeks, and a penalty will be exacted for keeping them longer, two cents a day. A postal-card notice will be sent at the expiration of a fortnight. If the book is not returned a week later, a library messenger will go to the house, obtain the book and collect twenty cents messenger service.

Kobbé includes much more detail of Newark’s cultural features, including descriptions of historic buildings, churches, cemeteries, parks and athletic clubs.

THE UNHEALTHY SIDE OF A THRIVING METROPOLIS

The very growth and business success that the City had enjoyed led to a host of unhealthy conditions, transforming the proud city into what Galishoff calls a “cesspool of human and animal excrement and industrial wastes.” In the late nineteenth century, particularly in the summer, conditions in Newark were perfect for the spread of deadly diseases such as cholera, typhoid and malaria. Smallpox epidemics swept through the city periodically. Other diseases were equally lethal, particularly to children, including tuberculosis and respiratory illness.²⁹

As the poor and working class lived in increasingly densely packed housing, situated in locations which were low lying and prone to flooding, and served by inadequate privies and outhouses and unsafe water supplies, the city repeatedly turned its gaze away. Those in power resisted spending the money to provide effective sewerage systems and a safe drinking water supply.

Galishoff’s book has damning language about the skewed priorities of those in power in the city, explaining that those governing the city were overly concerned with keeping tax rates low in order to attract still more business, choosing this over investing in the necessary improvements to both avoid and treat disease, particularly among the poor.

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Lack of adequate facilities for treating the sick poor was only one indicator of the city’s business orientation. The material progress of Newark during the late nineteenth century had been purchased at the cost of a ravaged environment and an increase in morbidity and mortality. In 1883, alarm over the city’s worsening sanitary condition led one Newark newspaper to declare: “Our weekly mortality reports show the outbreaks from time to time of preventable diseases in certain quarters, easily traceable to direct violations of the rules of health, and the ratio of death is generally above the average of our sister cities. If further evidence were needed we have only to use our eyes and noses to discover abounding causes.”³⁰

Galishoff also sees those in power as more concerned with the perceived threat of ungodly behavior among the immigrant population than with helping that population stay alive. He notes that for many years the mayoral contests were dominated not by concerns for making the city less unhealthy but for the immorality of German immigrants who engaged in such practices as visiting beer gardens on Sunday, the Sabbath.³¹

WHAT MADE THE CITY SO UNHEALTHY?

The lack of clean water was one of the prime factors in the spread of deadly disease. As he extols Newark’s virtues, Kobbé also innocently notes the following:

Newark has recently closed with the East Jersey Water Co. an important contract for the supply of pure water, which will add greatly to the advantages Newark has to offer as a place of residence. The Company has acquired water and water rights in the Pequannock water-shed and on the Pequannock river and its tributaries, located in the upper Passaic water-shed in the northern part of New Jersey. These have been acquired from the Lehigh Valley Railway Company, as lessee of the Morris Canal, and from the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures and the Dundee Water Power and Land Co., its contract with the last two named giving it the perpetual right to divert surplus water from the Passaic river or any of its tributaries.³²

Kobbé is referencing the fact that in 1889 Newark finally secured a safe source of water from the Pequannock River. Prior to that time residents and businesses procured water from either the Passaic River or private wells. The private wells were often contaminated by leaking privies or outhouses, many of which were made of wood and/or had open bottoms, creating conditions perfect for getting pollution into the soil and water table around them.³³ The contaminants thus released included the fecal contaminants that caused many of the most virulent diseases, including cholera, which was spread through fecalized water supplies.³⁴

The Passaic River was no better. During the twenty years of using water from the Passaic River, waterborne diseases had reached “near epidemic heights.”³⁵ This acquisition, so positively referenced by Kobbé, can best be considered in the context of a local newspaper account of the condition of the Passaic River, which had previously been the source of Newark’s drinking water. Like the other topics in this post, this article has taken on personal meaning, since it seemed eerily prescient of our current understanding of water pollution. The pollutants in the Passaic River may now be even broader ranging, but the language feels like it could be written today.

THE POLLUTION OF STREAMS

Elizabeth Daily Journal

Thursday, June 19, 1890

The Court of Errors and Appeals has just rendered a decision, the substance of which is that any city may empty its filth and sewage into any stream that runs, no matter how many cities lower down the stream are dependent on it for a supply of drinking water. The case was that of the city of Passaic, which was constructing a full system of sewers, to empty into the Passaic river, about six miles above the point at which Newark and Jersey City take their present water supply. As there are towns and cities on this river above the city of Passaic, doubtless the latter will feel like asking for an injunction after having imbibed diluted sewage for a few years.

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The very nastiness of this situation ought to incite American communities to find a way out of it. The Passaic river is polluted beyond a decent condition for bathing, let alone drinking, and if a good sized town should locate on the Elizabeth river above Ursino lake, it could, under the present laws, pollute our drinking water till every draught would bring the horrors of nausea or the perils of deadly disease. Yet there is no relief. The only thing a city can do is to go further off to seek a supply, and run the risk of having that supply contaminated in a few years.

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The situation grows worse and worse as population increases, and simply because the whole system is wrong. Living streams are not the proper receptacles for sewage and filth, and ought not to be. And it is only the question of dollars and cents that prostitutes them to these vile uses. Our sweet water rivers are little else today than open sewers, spreading disease and pestilence instead of giving health and sustaining life.

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And what makes the whole matter the more inexcusable is the fact that there is no necessity for such pollution. Men have devised plans for burning garbage, for receiving, distributing and purifying sewage and city refuse and turning the solid parts into valuable fertilizer. They have done all these things to perfection, and would continue to do them, only they have not made their processes pay. If in every city the water carriage system were abolished and dry earth systems substituted, and if the city would expend an amount of money commensurate with the sanitary advantages to be gained by such a course, there would be little deleterious nastiness to be swept into the crystal rivers and there would be vastly better health and vastly more cleanliness. The people of this country have never yet waked up to the necessities and advantages of dry earth systems and the proper treatment of what is commonly called sewage. The hundreds of children that die annually in every large city, from no other cause under heaven than foul drinking water, foul air from sewers and foul appertenances in water-piped dwelling houses are an awful sacrifice to the indifference of the people to sanitary subjects, and that sacrifice is annually increased as the rivers become more polluted. The present outhouse and watercloset system is a barbarity, a Moloch that calls for more victims than are eaten by the cannibals or slaughtered by the savages, or than are slain in battle in all the wars of all the nations. Yet they are perpetuated for centuries while Mother Nature is showing, as plainly as she can, what ought to be substituted for it. And science has also come to the rescue and developed full and effective systems that need only money to be put into operation. But there’s the rub. As between money and health the latter must be sacrificed. The time will come when the pollution of streams will be looked upon as the barbarity that it really is, and when the principle that what comes off the earth must, after its work is accomplished, go back to it again to fertilize it, will be recognized in all civilized communities. Then we will have clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and no peat holes in or around the places where decent human beings live.

The arrangement to procure water from the Pequannock River marks the first time Newark really had a clean water source. Even those still on private wells began shifting to the new source of water; by 1915 few wells were still in use. At about the same time, Newark finally finished the sewer system in all its neighborhoods.³⁶

Even though the “better” class of citizens thought that their perceived elevated moral standards and virtuous lifestyle would keep them from harm, the danger of these diseases was not limited only to poor and working-class people.³⁷ John Holmes Ballantine, one of three sons of Peter Ballantine, the founder of P. Ballantine and Sons Brewing Company, which by 1879 was the sixth largest brewery in the country, lost three daughters, one in infancy, and two, likely to cholera.³⁸ In 1884 he moved his family away from the factory, and away from the Passaic River, which was receiving pollution from a host of Newark industrial facilities, into a mansion where every detail was meant to denote wealth and status—including avoiding any white walls, which were considered a sign of poverty.³⁹ The beautifully decorated walls had to be washed regularly to remove the buildup of coal smoke endemic in the city. Perhaps the move was understood as being motivated by moving to a more fashionable and part of town, but the move may have helped save the remaining Ballantine children. Or perhaps the water from the Passaic had caused the fatal disease that killed two of the children.

Nor did the city prioritize providing adequate medical care facilities for its non-wealthy inhabitants. During this time period, many indigent patients availed themselves of the free care provided at Newark’s overworked dispensary, maintained in the offices of its Board of Health. As a measure of need, Galishoff notes that the dispensary reached a peak of service in 1878, caring for more than 70,500 patients at a time when the city’s population was less than 140,000. Galishoff notes, however, that this swell in demand for care did not galvanize the city to create a public hospital, which they continued to defer. Rather they simply put stricter limits on who could access dispensary care, limiting care to those whose income was less than ten dollars per week. Those in power were sure that many individuals were finding ways to circumvent the income requirements, and defraud the system, not that there was a need for additional facilities. It was not until 1882 that the first public hospital facility was opened in one wing of an existing building. The hospital later acquired its own building, providing free care for the poor.⁴⁰

DISEASE AS THE HAND OF GOD, AGAIN

Not only were the poor, especially immigrants, subject to the most dangerous conditions, but they were also subjected to what one newspaper at least had earlier characterized as the “intemperance theory” of disease, more a “theory” that existed in the popular imagination than an actual medical theory.⁴¹ The prevalence of the bias this indicates ties back to what I described in a previous post as the anti-immigrant animus developed by “nativists.” The “intemperance theory” suggested that the incidence of disease among the poor arose out of lack of temperance (e.g. frequenting beer halls, on the Sabbath, no less) and other filthy living habits.

The reader might notice that this attitude harkens back to the earlier colonial notion of disease being the hand of God, fortuitously sweeping away whole populations of the ungodly savages who had the temerity to live in the wilderness that the colonists had come to transform into wealth and status. As I have also shown, this attitude about natives was expressed confidently again in the 1860s, in one of Samuel Townsend’s propagandistic pamphlets.

ANNA AND THE RESPONSE TO HER MALARIA

Anna contracted malaria in the early 1880s, when Newark was finally coming to its senses about making the city less unhealthy for its less affluent residents. How poor were the Molloys, before coming to the village? Did they suffer under the City’s regime of neglect? Anna explains that “Father’s circumstance was modest,” which raised questions about how the family would carry out the doctor’s directive that Anna must be taken to the country, if the family expected to be able to raise her.

But the very fact that they were using their own doctor suggests that the family was not indigent, and did not have to seek care at one of the overtaxed facilities for the poor. Moreover, through that doctor, the family had resources. Anna reported that the intervention of the sister of their doctor with “General” Halstead secured her father a job away from the city, first at one of Warren Ackerman’s farm purchases, and then, at the Deserted Village. The term “General” was an honorary one, recognizing Halstead’s contributions to the Union Army during the Civil War, in providing needed equipment and supplies. It was through providing goods to outfit the Union army that he knew Warren Ackerman.

We know the Molloys took action quickly on their doctor’s recommendation to get Anna out of the city. What we don’t know is which of the four kinds of malaria she had contracted, what treatment, if any, she received, or what the impacts were on her during the rest of her life. The 84-year-old Anna doesn’t tell us this.

Nor does she tell us whether malaria continued to affect her later in life. Many individuals who had malaria suffer with repeated impacts later in life. Anna’s removal from the mosquito infested waters around Newark likely saved her from subsequent new infections of malaria, and may have saved her from serious lasting impacts.

Anna and her family arrived at the Village just in time for Warren to begin collaborating with Ella King Adams on the conversion of the village into the resort of Glenside Park.

A FINAL QUESTION

My final question is not about disease or any of the other topics of this post. When I first saw Anna’s letter, I did not have the benefit of the research which has now shown me that Anna’s grandmother, Mary Hoyne, had worked in the household of the same General Halstead who secured a place for Anna’s parents and herself. Mary had just died, according to Anna’s letter, but one would think the family still had access to help from Halstead without recourse to their doctor’s sister. Perhaps the doctor’s sister was simply the one who made the mental connection that Halstead had friends who might be able to help out, friends who owned country properties who might be hiring men whose situations were “modest.”

Thanks for following me on this personal journey. Join me next month as we follow the Molloys to the beginnings of their work at the new resort of Glenside Park.

Until then!