Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  With an autopsy knife, Hultin sliced out most of her lungs and immersed the sections in a chemical solution. Thinking it might be inappropriate to store Lucy’s organs in the school refrigerator, Hultin burrowed a hole in the ice-cold ground and placed the container there overnight. The next day he and his crew shoveled all the dirt back into the grave and replaced the sod exactly as it had looked before.

  Hultin added something, too. In 1951 there were wooden crosses at each end of the burial site, but they had both rotted away to almost nothing over the years. Before rushing back to San Francisco, Hultin went into the school’s workshop and constructed two new crosses, which he mounted where the originals had stood. They were his tribute to the dead and his thank-you to the community that had shown him such hospitality.

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  Once he returned to San Francisco, Hultin still had the logistical matter of getting the prized specimens safely to Taubenberger. Flying to Washington, D.C., and personally delivering them would have been the quickest and most dependable option, but it was too expensive, and Hultin had already personally sunk $4,100 into the Alaska trip. He feared that if he shipped the package, though, it could get lost or ruined. Hultin divided the lungs into four pieces and, hedging his bets, sent one by UPS, one through the regular postal service, and two using Federal Express, from two different towns.

  Taubenberger received all four parcels in perfect condition. Within a week he and Ann Reid verified that Lucy’s lung tissue contained Spanish influenza, and it was the same viral strain that had killed Private Roscoe Vaughn at Fort Jackson. More testing confirmed that the virus was dead, just as Hultin had found almost half a century earlier. But this time it didn’t matter. By using PCR they were able to decode its entire genetic sequence, a historic achievement in itself. Taubenberger wasn’t satisfied, however, and decided to go one step further. He wanted to bring Spanish influenza back to life.

  This raised obvious ethical and security issues, since the virus—which is twenty-five times more deadly than the regular seasonal flu—could conceivably be used as a biological weapon or accidentally released. But Taubenberger believed that the benefits of re-creating the virus, publishing its genetic code, and allowing other scientists to study its makeup outweighed the dangers. To do all of this required the approval and participation of numerous government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, and the National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity. Authorization was granted, and the experiment took place in the CDC’s Biosafety Level 3 laboratory, a highly secure airtight facility reserved for “indigenous or exotic agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation.”

  In October 2005, Taubenberger and his team finally announced that, after reconstructing Spanish influenza’s complete gene sequence, they had also successfully regrown the virus, a feat never before accomplished with an extinct disease. Mice exposed to the virus died within three days, and when it was injected into human lung tissue (in a Petri dish; nobody was actually infected), it rapidly destroyed the cells. Based on Taubenberger’s findings, some pathologists have theorized that the reason healthy people in their twenties and thirties succumbed to Spanish influenza at a higher rate than children and the elderly was precisely because these young men and women were strong and robust; their immune systems overreacted to the extremely aggressive virus, causing their lungs to flood with bodily fluids rich in white blood cells.

  “It’s clear that the 1918 virus remains particularly lethal,” Taubenberger said after bringing about its Lazarus-like resurrection, “and determining whether pandemic influenza virus strains can emerge via different pathways will affect the scope and focus of surveillance and prevention efforts.” Deciphering how a specific virus operates opens up insights into other viral strains and reveals how they grow, mutate, jump from animal to animal, and attack their hosts. Research based on Lucy’s lung tissue has already led to improved flu vaccines that have prevented larger epidemics, and ideally, someday scientists will build on Hultin and Taubenberger’s work to uncover a genetic Achilles’ heel in one strain that will make it possible to wipe out all of them.

  Here in Brevig Mission, the temperature has dipped noticeably and the sky is darkening. I check my watch and see that it’s almost 4:00 P.M.

  I walk to the hangar and wave at Lisa, who’s already waiting and looks like she’s engrossed in her notes. I plunk down on the gravel and pull the “Lucy/Brevig Mission” file out of my backpack. While passing through Nome on my way here I stopped in the city’s lone historical museum to see what information it had regarding the pandemic’s impact on Alaska. A staff member kindly photocopied for me magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and personal correspondences describing how swiftly and unexpectedly Spanish flu had descended on this region.

  “You had hardly gotten out of sight when the whole town came down with the epidemic,” a Nome banker named Levi Ashton wrote to his neighbor Joe (no last name is given) on February 9, 1919.

  In many cases the little babies suffered terribly. Houses were broken open and the babies found in bed with their dead mother, sometimes the children were alive and sometimes they were not. A woman who lived a short distance below Chinik called there for provisions and left again for home. The Chinik people forgot about her for about a week and then someone thought to look her up and see how she fared. A man went to the cabin but was driven away by the dogs, that were starving and showed a desire to attack him. He went back to Chinik and got a gun, killed the dogs and broke into the cabin. He found the four grown natives dead and four small children huddled up in the fur robes trying to keep warm without any fire. The older two had taken what milk they had under the robes with them and to keep it from freezing to feed the babies on and had frozen their feet and legs and hands in their endeavor to keep the smaller ones warm. One child had its feet frozen to the floor. They brought them to Chinik and then to Nome. One child had to have its feet cut off, and later it died.

  Ashton also mentioned several Alaskans who took their own lives rather than risk becoming infected.

  During the epidemic there were but three suicides. Two natives hung themselves over in Baldwin’s gymnasium. One of them hung himself to a hat and coat hook on the wall which was too low to do the job properly and he had to kneel down to accomplish his ends. When he had expired a friend took him down and removing the noose from his neck placed it on his own and repeated the stunt.

  I finish reading the six-page typewritten letter and just sit for a moment trying to figure out why Ashton felt compelled to write such a graphic and detailed account. Partly, I guess, there was the practical matter of sharing information with an old friend at a time when newspapers had been shut down and other forms of communication were limited. (Ashton refers to the letter itself as “this bulletin.”) With respect to the more explicit descriptions, there must be something cathartic about getting images like those out of one’s head and down on paper. It’s a coping mechanism, especially in the aftermath of such an immense tragedy. I also wonder if, maybe subconsciously, Ashton hoped that his letter would be passed down over the years—which, in the end, it was—as evidence of how horrific a disaster like this truly can be. Societies are forgetful, and with forgetting comes complacency. Ashton’s recollections are a warning to anyone who might question, at the outset of a potentially similar epidemic, whether all the government alerts and preventive measures are worth the time, expense, and effort. Yes, the letter says, emphatically. More so than we could ever imagine.

  A faint buzz grows louder over the horizon, and from behind a bank of clouds a small plane bursts cinematically into view. Our ride is here. Lisa and I make small talk in the minute or so we have to wait before walking to the airstrip.

  I ask her where she’s off to after Nome.

  “Back to Seattle. And you?”

  “South Carolina, to see the grave of a guy named Henry Laurens,” I tell
Lisa right before the roar of propellers drowns out our conversation.

  Laurens served as president of the Continental Congress in 1777, and was imprisoned by British troops in the Tower of London after being captured during a secret diplomatic mission to Europe. What especially interests me about Laurens, however, is not his life but his death, which marked the beginning of the most significant shift in burial practices in American history. And this posthumous angle is what’s determining which graves I’m visiting for the penultimate leg of my journey. An extraordinary biography is not enough; any number of fascinating individuals lie buried and forgotten throughout the United States. For my purposes, each story, like Lucy’s here in Brevig Mission, must center on the corpse itself. Or, in the case of Henry Laurens, the lack thereof.

  HENRY LAURENS’S GRAVE

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  TO DESCRIBE MEPKIN Abbey in eastern South Carolina as heavenly is far too easy, but goodness is this place gorgeous. Thirty miles north of Charleston, the three-thousand-acre estate was given as a gift to the Catholic Church in 1949 by publishing magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe, and it’s now run by Trappist monks.

  “No matter how stressful my day has been,” Thomas Ashe Lockhart tells me while making a turn off Dr. Evans Road into a long, tree-lined driveway, “the moment I come through these gates, all of my cares go away.”

  Lockhart is the great-great-great-great grandson of Henry Laurens, a South Carolinian aristocrat who owned Mepkin for thirty years during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Laurens’s funeral here in December 1792 might have been more symbolic than consequential, but it represented the beginning of a trend that has fundamentally altered how Americans dispose of their bodies and choose to be memorialized.

  We park near the gift shop, and Tom, a spry eighty-one-year-old attorney originally from North Carolina, guides me across lush, rolling lawns bordered by giant oaks draped in Spanish moss. We pass through a small forest and up a hill to the brick-walled enclosure where Henry Laurens and his family are buried. Along the way, Tom has been sharing with me a biographical sketch of the man he refers to as “one of America’s most overlooked Founding Fathers.”

  “Did you know that Laurens kept George Washington from being fired during the Revolution?” he asks me.

  I did not. I knew that Washington had his critics, but I wasn’t aware that he came close to being removed as commander. Leading the charge, Tom tells me, was Thomas Conway, an Irish-born general serving in the Continental Army who became peeved at Washington for delaying his promotion to major general. He and other officers, including Washington’s former aide-de-camp Thomas Mifflin, questioned Washington’s leadership abilities after the Army had suffered a string of early defeats, and they pushed for General Horatio Gates to replace him when Gates’s troops beat the British at Saratoga. (Gates received all the glory, but Major General Benedict Arnold, in his pre-traitorous days, also deserved credit for the win, and this lack of recognition was one of many slights that turned Arnold against his country.) Henry Laurens helped quash the mini rebellion with assistance from the Marquis de Lafayette, and Conway was demoted. He continued badmouthing Washington until General John Cadwalader challenged him to a duel to shut him up once and for all. Cadwalader did so literally, shooting Conway in the mouth.

  “Imagine the war without Washington,” Tom says, “or if he’d never been president. Laurens saved him.”

  The third of six children, Henry Laurens was born on March 6, 1724, in Charleston, South Carolina. At age twenty-three he launched what became a lucrative import/export company that bought and sold everything from furniture, dyes, and rum to animal pelts, white indentured servants, and African slaves. Tom emphasizes to me that Laurens withdrew from the slave trade before the Revolution.

  In the summer of 1750, Laurens married nineteen-year-old Eleanor Ball. None of their first three children lived past infancy. John Laurens, born in 1754, was the first to survive into maturity. Five years later came Martha, who was stricken with smallpox during an epidemic in 1760 and pronounced dead. But while preparing her body for burial, Martha’s doctor made the astonishing discovery that she was in fact still conscious, and, after several days of vigilant care, she recovered fully. Henry Laurens was elated but also shaken by how close Martha had come to being buried alive, and the experience left a deep impression on him.

  Laurens entered public life in 1757, serving first in South Carolina’s Common House Assembly. He was initially cool to the idea of America breaking from the Motherland and pushed for reconciliation, but after British troops attacked South Carolina and the Declaration of Independence was signed, his support for the Revolution became unwavering. In January 1777 he was voted into the Continental Congress, and later that year his fellow representatives unanimously elected him president.

  Laurens resigned as president of the Continental Congress in December 1778 and accepted a diplomatic assignment to solicit $10 million (and those are eighteenth-century dollars) in war funding from the Dutch. He was also responsible for negotiating a long-term treaty of “amity and commerce” with the Netherlands. While rounding the coast of Newfoundland en route to Europe, Laurens’s ship was captured by the British. Laurens stuffed sensitive documents into weighted sacks and pitched them overboard, but English sailors easily fished the bobbing bundles out of the sea. Inside they found a list of prominent Dutchmen sympathetic to American independence, along with the proposed treaty. Great Britain declared war on the Netherlands and accused Laurens of high treason. Fifty-six years old and suffering from gout, he was shipped to England and confined to the Tower of London.

  “The ‘Constable of the Tower,’ ” Tom says to me, “was officially the British general Lord Cornwallis. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the man he handed his sword to was Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, Henry’s son. Cornwallis was swapped for Laurens in a prisoner-of-war exchange, and he came back to Mepkin in 1784 after spending some time in Paris.”

  “Laurens led quite a life,” I say to Tom, who nods in agreement.

  And it was a life made even more historic by how it ended. “Having settled all affairs which relate to my estate and provided for the different parts of my family in a manner which appears to me to be just and equitable, I come to the disposal of my own person,” Laurens wrote in his will. “I solemnly enjoin it upon my son as an indispensable duty that as soon as he conveniently can after my decease, he cause my body to be wrapped in twelve yards of town cloth and burnt until it be entirely and totally consumed” (emphasis added). These instructions aren’t remarkable today, but in the 1700s they were unprecedented; before Laurens, no American had been cremated per his—or her—request, and on December 8, 1792, Laurens became the first.

  This distinction is often bestowed on Joseph De Palm, an elderly New Yorker cremated in Pennsylvania on December 6, 1876, but Laurens remains the real trailblazer, so to speak. De Palm, it’s true, was the first to be incinerated by a crematorium (Laurens went up in smoke atop an outdoor pyre), and his send-off is better documented because it was viewed by a gaggle of doctors, clergymen
, scientists, and several dozen reporters, some of whom had traveled from Europe. Laurens’s cremation was held privately here at Mepkin and attended solely by loved ones. Whether family members felt that the spectacle was too dreadful to relate or were embarrassed that Laurens had picked a burial rite normally associated with pagans and Native Indians isn’t clear, but apparently not one witness wrote about the cremation. His daughter Martha refrained from mentioning it in an otherwise detailed letter she sent her husband after the funeral, although she later referred to it, once, as “that awful ceremony.”

  The only contemporary account I could find describing it was printed in a London newspaper:

  A few days since departed this life Henry Laurens, Esq., about seventy years of age, and his corpse was burned the Thursday after his decease. This was done by his son at the request of his father, who made this reserve in his will, that unless his son complied with this he should be cut short in any of his estate, which is worth £50,000. The ashes remaining from the body were taken up and put into a silver urn for that purpose.

  Squinting to see if there’s a cross or some other religious icon on Laurens’s faded headstone and finding none, I ask Tom if Laurens considered himself a religious man.

  “Absolutely,” Tom says. “He was a devout Episcopalian from a long line of Huguenots.”