The Martyrs of Memphis

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 1993 issue of Memphis magazine.

Death swarmed into Memphis on little wings that awful summer of 1878. Borne by a tiny mosquito, it flew into taverns and shops, bedrooms and parlors. No one could escape, for no one knew the cure — or the cause — of the dreaded fever. When the plague finally lifted in the fall, Memphis — once one of the fastest growing cities in the South — was a city of the dead. Entire blocks lay desolate and empty. Yellow fever had claimed more than 5,000 victims, and thousands fled the city, many never to return. But two priests and four sisters of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral remained here to nurse the sick and comfort the dying. This is their story.

“A bayou divided the city, which was the receptacle of the contents of privies and water closets, [and] was sluggish and without current. Dead animals were decaying in many parts of it, and the pools which formed at the abutments of the several bridges were stagnant and covered with a scum of putridity, emitting a deadly effluvia.”

So wrote J.M. Keating, editor of the Memphis Appeal, in a book published about the epidemic in 1879. Despite the construction of a crude waterworks, most Memphians still drew their water from cisterns and wells and tossed their waste into Bayou Gayoso or onto the gravel streets, which Keating said were “reeking with the offal and excreta of ten thousand families.” When the Mississippi River flooded, bottomlands to the north and south of the city turned into breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti mosquito — the deadly carrier of yellow fever.

Since its founding, Memphis had endured outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, and dengue fever. An earlier epidemic of yellow fever in 1873 killed some 2,000 people here. Certain citizens urged health precautions and sanitary reforms, but they were casually ignored when the diseases passed. Editor Keating attacked such complacency: “We fear the apathy and feeling of false security which an abatement of the disease induces. Another epidemic which prostrated our city will annihilate it.” It was a hint of the disaster that would fall just five years later.

The bad news came on July 27th, when newspapers reported yellow fever cases in New Orleans. In two weeks the disease spread northward as far as Grenada, Mississippi. Even then, one local newspaper said there was nothing to worry about: “Whenever yellow fever shows itself, as is not at all likely, the board of health will promptly report it. Keep cool! Avoid patent medicines and bad whiskey. Go about your business as usual; be cheerful, and laugh as much as possible.”

Others decided that laughing in the face of certain death was lunacy, so the city set up quarantine stations along the railroads and riverfront. It was too late. The first yellow fever death occurred here on August 13th, followed by seven deaths on the 14th, 22 deaths on the 15th, and 33 deaths on the 16th. Nobody was laughing now — yellow fever had arrived.

One doctor later observed that the 1878 epidemic struck Memphis “with unusual malignity and unusual rapidity.” Often the first symptom was little more than a slight chill. Within hours, victims would suffer headaches, temperatures as high as 106, a wildly erratic pulse, a peculiar odor to the skin that smelled like “rotten hay,” and a yellowish tinge to the skin and eyeballs. “A patient at this stage,” reported one Memphis doctor, “is restless, sighs, halloos, screams, attempts to get up, falls about, half-conscious, and can’t tell why he cannot lie still, nor can he give any reason why he cries out.” Blood would ooze out of the skin, and the last stage of the disease was black vomit. After that, death would come within days — sometimes hours.

Doctors had no clue. One St. Louis physician believed that “yellow fever was persistent in the form of dry particles of dust everywhere.” A Texas doctor concluded that the fever was a “subtle poison that explodes in the air.” All they knew was that it came in the summer and unaccountably faded in the fall.

Most cures were absurdly worthless. A Kentucky doctor advised his patients to remain horizontal, with their feet in a tub of hot water. To stop the black vomit, he recommended sticking leeches on the stomach. A Louisville physician fumigated patients’ rooms with camphor. “My theory is a plain remedy,” he wrote. “If it does not cure, then it cannot kill.”

An eerie silence smothered the city, broken only by the occasional booming of cannons (fired to break up the “poisons” in the air), and the steady clop-clop of doctors’ wagons or carts hauling caskets.

The only sure prevention was escape. Within 10 days of the first yellow fever death in Memphis, more than half the population fled the city in a panic. They left “by every possible conveyance — by hacks, carriages, buggies, wagons, furniture vans, and street drays,” wrote Keating. “By anything that could float on the river, and by the railroads. The stream of passengers seemed endless, and they seemed to be as mad as they were many.”

Left behind were still some 20,000 men, women, and children, but Memphis faded into a ghost town. Shops and offices were boarded up, houses locked and shuttered. An eerie silence smothered the city, broken only by the occasional booming of cannons (fired to break up the “poisons” in the air), and the steady clop-clop of doctors’ wagons or carts hauling caskets. At night, smoldering fires of burning bedding and clothing — the last belongings of fever victims — lit the yellow-armbanded Howard Association members, who scurried from house to house aiding the sick.

Victims dropped dead in the streets, and bodies were discovered each morning in the city’s parks. Editorials in the Daily Avalanche, still publishing though most of its staff was stricken, traced the deadly progress of the epidemic. August 30th: “We are doomed. It is hard, as we write in this dark dismal hour of death, not to realize the full meaning of that brief sentence.” September 1st: “The King of Terrors continues to snatch victims with fearful rapidity. Three short weeks ago our city was active with business of all classes … now our streets are deserted, our stores and residences empty.” September 5th: “Great God! How his murderous work has increased. Those that are left are busy burying the dead.” September 11th: “A stricken city. Alas, fair Memphis! What sights meet the eye of those who remain in your midst.”

St. Mary’s Cathedral, then a plain wooden church on Poplar, stood as a beacon of hope amid the gloom, and two priests there — Charles Parsons and Louis Schuyler — played heroic roles during the epidemic. They joined dozens of other church members throughout the city who, along with the Howard Association, died at their posts during the ordeal.

Parsons, a West Point graduate who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, was ordained a priest at St. Mary’s in 1872. That same year, the Episcopal Bishop of Tennessee persuaded the Community of St. Mary in Peekskill, New York, to send several nuns to Memphis to open a school and manage an orphanage. The first St. Mary’s sisters — Constance (the Superior), Thecla, Hughetta, and Amelia — arrived in Memphis in 1873. When Amelia’s health failed, she was replaced by Sister Frances, who came here in 1877.

When the epidemic hit in 1878, Constance and Thecla were traveling in New York and quickly returned to Memphis. By their arrival on August 20th, the disease was out of control, sweeping through the densely populated sections of the city between the river and Bayou Gayoso. Constance wrote in her journal about her arrival: “A strange and sad Sunday. Sister Thecla found three unknown persons insensible and without attendants on High Street.”

By this time, the city government and board of health ceased to exist; yellow fever cut the police force from 41 to 7; it was survival of the fittest for the thousands who stayed behind. Constance and her sisters set up a soup kitchen and began 24-hour visits to families hit by the fever. The Citizens Relief Organization asked the sisters to open the Canfield Asylum outside of town as a refuge for children orphaned by the disease. When Constance, a few days later, attempted to take children there she met an angry mob, terrified that the nuns were bringing the infection into their neighborhood. Constance faced them down: “Sirs, is it possible you would have us refuse to these children the very protection you have obtained for your own? We do not propose to make a hospital of the asylum.” The men let her pass. Within four days, Constance and her sisters placed more than 50 orphans there.

The death toll rose to more than 200 a day, and the situation seemed hopeless. Parsons wrote to the bishop: “It is impossible. Go and turn the Destroying Angel loose upon a defenseless city; let him smite who he will, young and old, rich and poor, the feeble and the strong … and then you can form some idea of what Memphis and this valley is.”

The New York church decided to send two more nuns to St. Mary’s in August. This was good news, but Constance wrote to the Mother Superior in New York, “I will guard them to the utmost, but you know and I know that they are offering their lives.” Two nuns — Ruth and Helen — responded to the request for help in Memphis. Ruth wrote to a friend: “The telegram came, asking for more helpers, before I had time to offer myself; but the Mother has chosen me, and you know how gladly and unreservedly I give myself to our dear Lord. Pray for me, that in life, in death, I may be ever His own.”

When they arrived in Memphis, the new nuns probably felt they had come to hell on earth. “The city is desolate,” wrote Ruth. “Everyone who is not ill says, ‘It is only a matter of time.’” Money and other aid trickled in from other cities, chiefly in the North, but it was little help. “Money is quite useless,” wrote Ruth. “There is plenty of money here, but it buys no head to plan, no hands to wash, nor the common necessaries of life.”

Doctors and nurses died one by one, and druggists closed. It was becoming impossible to obtain the most basic items. “We are helpless and do not know what to do nor how help can come,” wrote Ruth. “There are nearly fifty children here now [in the orphanage]; we have no clean clothes, and it is utterly impossible to get any washing done. There is no one to send for supplies, and no stores are open.”

Each day brought new grief. One evening, a member of the Howard Association heard a woman singing as he passed a house in the suburbs. When he looked inside, he saw that she was pacing back and forth across the room, holding a child to her breast. A closer look showed the baby had been dead several days. The Howard visitor gently took the child from the woman and had it buried; the poor mother was taken to an asylum, “where she is a confirmed lunatic, and paces the ward with a bundle in her arms, crooning a lullaby to what she imagines is her living babe.”

A family on McKinley Street sent a note to the Howards, begging, “For God’s sake come and help us, we are all dying!” Keating related that the Howard member who went to their aid “found a child had been dead a day, and all of the family were sick without any attendance whatever.”

The nuns of St. Mary’s had their share of horrors. Sister Constance wrote: “Yesterday I found two young girls, who had spent two days in a two-room cottage with the unburied bodies of their parents, their uncle in the utmost suffering and delirium, and no one near them. It was twenty-four hours before I could get those fearful corpses buried, and then I had to send for a police officer … before any undertaker would enter that room.”

Some of the episodes were grimly humorous. Keating tells that the sexton of St. Patrick’s Church was screwing down the lid of a coffin when the person inside “opened his eyes and asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ A little trepidated, if not consternated, they lifted him from his close confinement and put him into bed.”

On another occasion, Constance wrote, “I saw a nurse stop [an undertaker’s cart] today and ask for a certain man’s residence. The driver pointed over his shoulder with his whip at the heap of coffins behind him and answered, ‘I’ve got him here in his coffin.’”

Most of those coffins were bound for Elmwood Cemetery, where the dead lay unburied for days while crews worked day and night to dig graves. The only remedy was to bury the victims in mass, anonymous plots. “On Sunday last, it would have made one’s heart ache to have seen a gentleman searching for the lost grave of his wife at Elmwood Cemetery,” wrote Keating. “He had purchased a private grave, but it cannot be found, and the horrible belief that his wife had been buried in a trench or ditch haunted the unfortunate man as he wandered around, searching and weeping. He had flowers to strew on the grave, but he searched in vain. The grave was lost.”

The sisters’ work was endless. “I just crawled home and fairly dropped into bed, first time in three nights,” wrote Constance. “Sister Thecla sick all night.” And it was frustrating: “We can easily say, in this sad world, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” wrote Ruth, “but it is very, very hard to say, Thy will be done.”

The hard work soon took its toll. On September 2nd, Parsons became ill with the fever and was put to bed. Constance visited him and wrote, “He was very cheerful. I offered to do him some little service, such as fanning him, or putting up the mosquito net, but he said quickly, ‘No, no, I beg you not; indeed, I could not let you fatigue yourself. I looked at his nurse; she whispered: ‘Let him have his way; I never saw anyone so unselfish as he is.’”

She wrote later, “Mr. Parsons had a chill this evening. I shall know before twelve whether it was THE chill.” Her fears were soon confirmed. The sisters watched over Parsons fretfully, but he died on September 7th.

Two days later, one of the other nuns found Constance resting on a sofa in the parlor of St. Mary’s and summoned a doctor. “I have not the fever,” she protested to him. “It is only a bad headache; it will go off at sunset.” Ruth tried to put Constance to bed, but she refused: “It is the only comfortable one in the house, and if I have the fever, you will have to burn it.”

Within the hour, Sister Thecla returned to the church after a deathbed visit to a poor woman and told the others, “I am so sorry, Sister, but I have the fever. Give me a cup of tea, and I shall go to bed.” By the next morning, both sisters were dreadfully ill. Constance became delirious. Ruth wrote: “All through that night I could hear from my room her low moan. At about midnight she exclaimed ‘Hosanna,’ repeating it again and again more faintly. That was her last word.” On the morning of September 9th, Ruth reported that Constance’s soul “entered the Paradise of Perfect Love.” She continued: “She was but thirty-three years old when called away; a woman of exquisite grace, tenderness, and loveliness of character, very highly educated, and one who might have adorned the most brilliant social circle. All that she had she gave without reserve to her Lord.”

Sister Thecla remained conscious until the end. One day a friend went to visit her, and Thecla opened her eyes with some consternation: “Oh, why did you come? I was thinking of heavenly things.” She closed her eyes again, and murmured, “I was with Jesus, and you have disturbed me.” She died on September 12th.

Sister Ruth was the next victim. Just 26 years old, she had been a nun only a year. “But in this one year,” wrote another sister, “she has brought comfort to many suffering ones, and helped to lead back those who had strayed far out of the way. Many of the poor speak of her as the ‘Sunbeam’ that came to brighten their lives.” Ruth died on September 17th.

Sister Frances had been in charge of the orphanage home — a task that grew more difficult when the other sisters became ill. She caught the fever in August, and recovered, but suffered a relapse on October 1st; she died just three days later. “The children were all so fond of Sister Frances, ” wrote one of the sisters. “Charlie goes out by himself to lay flowers on the grave, and stands looking so pitifully upon it; he is the oldest boy of the home.”

Yellow fever had infected more than 100,000 people, causing some 20,000 deaths — more than 5,000 in Memphis alone. Our city, one of the hardest hit, was so devastated that it lost its charter.

There was one final martyr of St. Mary’s. Father Louis Schuyler reported for duty in Memphis after Parsons died. Instead of staying at a hotel outside the fever district, Schuyler insisted on remaining at St. Mary’s so he could “go into the very thick of the pestilence in the lower portion of the city.” He couldn’t attend Sister Constance’s funeral because he wanted to visit some sick children in the neighborhood. After only four days of constant labor, Schuyler fell ill with fever, and died on September 17th.

The frost finally came exactly one month later, killing the mosquitos and ending the worst epidemic in our city’s history. When it was over, 200 towns and cities across the South lay wasted. Yellow fever had infected more than 100,000 people, causing some 20,000 deaths — more than 5,000 in Memphis alone. Our city, one of the hardest hit, was so devastated that it lost its charter. Another wave of yellow fever swept through the next year, with smaller epidemics every year after that, but nothing compared to the devastation of 1878. It wasn’t until 1900 that Dr. Walter Reed, an American army surgeon working in Cuba, finally discovered that mosquitos were the source of the plague.

Out of the death and chaos, the noble work performed by the priests and nuns of St. Mary’s lives on. “We say sometimes in cynical wrath that all truth and justice have departed out of this world,” said a September 25, 1878, editorial in the New York Tribune. “But those poor Sisters lying dead in Memphis are an all-sufficient refutation of our pessimistic generalities. This generous giving ought to silence, for a time at least, the snarls of the misanthropists. It is strange that so much dying should prove to us that the world is worth living in.”

Today, the massive altar in St. Mary’s Cathedral bears the names of the sisters who died in 1878 (along with Sister Hughetta, who survived the epidemic and died in 1922). A brass wall plaque and stained-glass window are further tributes to the sisters and to Parsons and Schuyler. In 1985, the Episcopal Church gave them a lasting tribute, adding “The Martyrs of Memphis, Constance and Her Companions” to the church’s Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. The feast day is observed on September 9th each year.

In Elmwood Cemetery, a simple shaft marks the double graves of both Parsons and Schuyler. Nearby, four names and dates are carved around the perimeter of a flat stone tablet: Constance, Sept. 9; Thecla, Sept. 12; Ruth, Sept. 17: Frances, Oct. 4 — the last resting place of the Martyrs of Memphis.

Death swarmed into Memphis on little wings that awful summer of 1878. Borne by a tiny mosquito, it flew into taverns and shops, bedrooms and parlors. No one could escape, for no one knew the cure — or the cause — of the dreaded fever. When the plague finally lifted in the fall, Memphis — once one of the fastest growing cities in the South — was a city of the dead. Entire blocks lay desolate and empty. Yellow fever had claimed more than 5,000 victims, and thousands fled the city, many never to return. But two priests and four sisters of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral remained here to nurse the sick and comfort the dying. This is their story.

“A bayou divided the city, which was the receptacle of the contents of privies and water closets, [and] was sluggish and without current. Dead animals were decaying in many parts of it, and the pools which formed at the abutments of the several bridges were stagnant and covered with a scum of putridity, emitting a deadly effluvia.”

So wrote J.M. Keating, editor of the Memphis Appeal, in a book published about the epidemic in 1879. Despite the construction of a crude waterworks, most Memphians still drew their water from cisterns and wells and tossed their waste into Bayou Gayoso or onto the gravel streets, which Keating said were “reeking with the offal and excreta of ten thousand families.” When the Mississippi River flooded, bottomlands to the north and south of the city turned into breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti mosquito — the deadly carrier of yellow fever.

Since its founding, Memphis had endured outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, and dengue fever. An earlier epidemic of yellow fever in 1873 killed some 2,000 people here. Certain citizens urged health precautions and sanitary reforms, but they were casually ignored when the diseases passed. Editor Keating attacked such complacency: “We fear the apathy and feeling of false security which an abatement of the disease induces. Another epidemic which prostrated our city will annihilate it.” It was a hint of the disaster that would fall just five years later.

The bad news came on July 27th, when newspapers reported yellow fever cases in New Orleans. In two weeks the disease spread northward as far as Grenada, Mississippi. Even then, one local newspaper said there was nothing to worry about: “Whenever yellow fever shows itself, as is not at all likely, the board of health will promptly report it. Keep cool! Avoid patent medicines and bad whiskey. Go about your business as usual; be cheerful, and laugh as much as possible.”

Others decided that laughing in the face of certain death was lunacy, so the city set up quarantine stations along the railroads and riverfront. It was too late. The first yellow fever death occurred here on August 13th, followed by seven deaths on the 14th, 22 deaths on the 15th, and 33 deaths on the 16th. Nobody was laughing now — yellow fever had arrived.

One doctor later observed that the 1878 epidemic struck Memphis “with unusual malignity and unusual rapidity.” Often the first symptom was little more than a slight chill. Within hours, victims would suffer headaches, temperatures as high as 106, a wildly erratic pulse, a peculiar odor to the skin that smelled like “rotten hay,” and a yellowish tinge to the skin and eyeballs. “A patient at this stage,” reported one Memphis doctor, “is restless, sighs, halloos, screams, attempts to get up, falls about, half-conscious, and can’t tell why he cannot lie still, nor can he give any reason why he cries out.” Blood would ooze out of the skin, and the last stage of the disease was black vomit. After that, death would come within days — sometimes hours.

Doctors had no clue. One St. Louis physician believed that “yellow fever was persistent in the form of dry particles of dust everywhere.” A Texas doctor concluded that the fever was a “subtle poison that explodes in the air.” All they knew was that it came in the summer and unaccountably faded in the fall.

Most cures were absurdly worthless. A Kentucky doctor advised his patients to remain horizontal, with their feet in a tub of hot water. To stop the black vomit, he recommended sticking leeches on the stomach. A Louisville physician fumigated patients’ rooms with camphor. “My theory is a plain remedy,” he wrote. “If it does not cure, then it cannot kill.”

The only sure prevention was escape. Within 10 days of the first yellow fever death in Memphis, more than half the population fled the city in a panic. They left “by every possible conveyance — by hacks, carriages, buggies, wagons, furniture vans, and street drays,” wrote Keating. “By anything that could float on the river, and by the railroads. The stream of passengers seemed endless, and they seemed to be as mad as they were many.”

Left behind were still some 20,000 men, women, and children, but Memphis faded into a ghost town. Shops and offices were boarded up, houses locked and shuttered. An eerie silence smothered the city, broken only by the occasional booming of cannons (fired to break up the “poisons” in the air), and the steady clop-clop of doctors’ wagons or carts hauling caskets. At night, smoldering fires of burning bedding and clothing — the last belongings of fever victims — lit the yellow-armbanded Howard Association members, who scurried from house to house aiding the sick.

Victims dropped dead in the streets, and bodies were discovered each morning in the city’s parks. Editorials in the Daily Avalanche, still publishing though most of its staff was stricken, traced the deadly progress of the epidemic. August 30th: “We are doomed. It is hard, as we write in this dark dismal hour of death, not to realize the full meaning of that brief sentence.” September 1st: “The King of Terrors continues to snatch victims with fearful rapidity. Three short weeks ago our city was active with business of all classes … now our streets are deserted, our stores and residences empty.” September 5th: “Great God! How his murderous work has increased. Those that are left are busy burying the dead.” September 11th: “A stricken city. Alas, fair Memphis! What sights meet the eye of those who remain in your midst.”

St. Mary’s Cathedral, then a plain wooden church on Poplar, stood as a beacon of hope amid the gloom, and two priests there — Charles Parsons and Louis Schuyler — played heroic roles during the epidemic. They joined dozens of other church members throughout the city who, along with the Howard Association, died at their posts during the ordeal.

Parsons, a West Point graduate who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, was ordained a priest at St. Mary’s in 1872. That same year, the Episcopal Bishop of Tennessee persuaded the Community of St. Mary in Peekskill, New York, to send several nuns to Memphis to open a school and manage an orphanage. The first St. Mary’s sisters — Constance (the Superior), Thecla, Hughetta, and Amelia — arrived in Memphis in 1873. When Amelia’s health failed, she was replaced by Sister Frances, who came here in 1877.

When the epidemic hit in 1878, Constance and Thecla were traveling in New York and quickly returned to Memphis. By their arrival on August 20th, the disease was out of control, sweeping through the densely populated sections of the city between the river and Bayou Gayoso. Constance wrote in her journal about her arrival: “A strange and sad Sunday. Sister Thecla found three unknown persons insensible and without attendants on High Street.”

By this time, the city government and board of health ceased to exist; yellow fever cut the police force from 41 to 7; it was survival of the fittest for the thousands who stayed behind. Constance and her sisters set up a soup kitchen and began 24-hour visits to families hit by the fever. The Citizens Relief Organization asked the sisters to open the Canfield Asylum outside of town as a refuge for children orphaned by the disease. When Constance, a few days later, attempted to take children there she met an angry mob, terrified that the nuns were bringing the infection into their neighborhood. Constance faced them down: “Sirs, is it possible you would have us refuse to these children the very protection you have obtained for your own? We do not propose to make a hospital of the asylum.” The men let her pass. Within four days, Constance and her sisters placed more than 50 orphans there.

The death toll rose to more than 200 a day, and the situation seemed hopeless. Parsons wrote to the bishop: “It is impossible. Go and turn the Destroying Angel loose upon a defenseless city; let him smite who he will, young and old, rich and poor, the feeble and the strong … and then you can form some idea of what Memphis and this valley is.”

The New York church decided to send two more nuns to St. Mary’s in August. This was good news, but Constance wrote to the Mother Superior in New York, “I will guard them to the utmost, but you know and I know that they are offering their lives.” Two nuns — Ruth and Helen — responded to the request for help in Memphis. Ruth wrote to a friend: “The telegram came, asking for more helpers, before I had time to offer myself; but the Mother has chosen me, and you know how gladly and unreservedly I give myself to our dear Lord. Pray for me, that in life, in death, I may be ever His own.”

When they arrived in Memphis, the new nuns probably felt they had come to hell on earth. “The city is desolate,” wrote Ruth. “Everyone who is not ill says, ‘It is only a matter of time.’” Money and other aid trickled in from other cities, chiefly in the North, but it was little help. “Money is quite useless,” wrote Ruth. “There is plenty of money here, but it buys no head to plan, no hands to wash, nor the common necessaries of life.”

Doctors and nurses died one by one, and druggists closed. It was becoming impossible to obtain the most basic items. “We are helpless and do not know what to do nor how help can come,” wrote Ruth. “There are nearly fifty children here now [in the orphanage]; we have no clean clothes, and it is utterly impossible to get any washing done. There is no one to send for supplies, and no stores are open.”

Each day brought new grief. One evening, a member of the Howard Association heard a woman singing as he passed a house in the suburbs. When he looked inside, he saw that she was pacing back and forth across the room, holding a child to her breast. A closer look showed the baby had been dead several days. The Howard visitor gently took the child from the woman and had it buried; the poor mother was taken to an asylum, “where she is a confirmed lunatic, and paces the ward with a bundle in her arms, crooning a lullaby to what she imagines is her living babe.”

A family on McKinley Street sent a note to the Howards, begging, “For God’s sake come and help us, we are all dying!” Keating related that the Howard member who went to their aid “found a child had been dead a day, and all of the family were sick without any attendance whatever.”

The nuns of St. Mary’s had their share of horrors. Sister Constance wrote: “Yesterday I found two young girls, who had spent two days in a two-room cottage with the unburied bodies of their parents, their uncle in the utmost suffering and delirium, and no one near them. It was twenty-four hours before I could get those fearful corpses buried, and then I had to send for a police officer … before any undertaker would enter that room.”

Some of the episodes were grimly humorous. Keating tells that the sexton of St. Patrick’s Church was screwing down the lid of a coffin when the person inside “opened his eyes and asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ A little trepidated, if not consternated, they lifted him from his close confinement and put him into bed.”

On another occasion, Constance wrote, “I saw a nurse stop [an undertaker’s cart] today and ask for a certain man’s residence. The driver pointed over his shoulder with his whip at the heap of coffins behind him and answered, ‘I’ve got him here in his coffin.’”

Most of those coffins were bound for Elmwood Cemetery, where the dead lay unburied for days while crews worked day and night to dig graves. The only remedy was to bury the victims in mass, anonymous plots. “On Sunday last, it would have made one’s heart ache to have seen a gentleman searching for the lost grave of his wife at Elmwood Cemetery,” wrote Keating. “He had purchased a private grave, but it cannot be found, and the horrible belief that his wife had been buried in a trench or ditch haunted the unfortunate man as he wandered around, searching and weeping. He had flowers to strew on the grave, but he searched in vain. The grave was lost.”

The sisters’ work was endless. “I just crawled home and fairly dropped into bed, first time in three nights,” wrote Constance. “Sister Thecla sick all night.” And it was frustrating: “We can easily say, in this sad world, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” wrote Ruth, “but it is very, very hard to say, Thy will be done.”

The hard work soon took its toll. On September 2nd, Parsons became ill with the fever and was put to bed. Constance visited him and wrote, “He was very cheerful. I offered to do him some little service, such as fanning him, or putting up the mosquito net, but he said quickly, ‘No, no, I beg you not; indeed, I could not let you fatigue yourself. I looked at his nurse; she whispered: ‘Let him have his way; I never saw anyone so unselfish as he is.’”

She wrote later, “Mr. Parsons had a chill this evening. I shall know before twelve whether it was THE chill.” Her fears were soon confirmed. The sisters watched over Parsons fretfully, but he died on September 7th.

Two days later, one of the other nuns found Constance resting on a sofa in the parlor of St. Mary’s and summoned a doctor. “I have not the fever,” she protested to him. “It is only a bad headache; it will go off at sunset.” Ruth tried to put Constance to bed, but she refused: “It is the only comfortable one in the house, and if I have the fever, you will have to burn it.”

Within the hour, Sister Thecla returned to the church after a deathbed visit to a poor woman and told the others, “I am so sorry, Sister, but I have the fever. Give me a cup of tea, and I shall go to bed.” By the next morning, both sisters were dreadfully ill. Constance became delirious. Ruth wrote: “All through that night I could hear from my room her low moan. At about midnight she exclaimed ‘Hosanna,’ repeating it again and again more faintly. That was her last word.” On the morning of September 9th, Ruth reported that Constance’s soul “entered the Paradise of Perfect Love.” She continued: “She was but thirty-three years old when called away; a woman of exquisite grace, tenderness, and loveliness of character, very highly educated, and one who might have adorned the most brilliant social circle. All that she had she gave without reserve to her Lord.”

Sister Thecla remained conscious until the end. One day a friend went to visit her, and Thecla opened her eyes with some consternation: “Oh, why did you come? I was thinking of heavenly things.” She closed her eyes again, and murmured, “I was with Jesus, and you have disturbed me.” She died on September 12th.

Sister Ruth was the next victim. Just 26 years old, she had been a nun only a year. “But in this one year,” wrote another sister, “she has brought comfort to many suffering ones, and helped to lead back those who had strayed far out of the way. Many of the poor speak of her as the ‘Sunbeam’ that came to brighten their lives.” Ruth died on September 17th.

Sister Frances had been in charge of the orphanage home — a task that grew more difficult when the other sisters became ill. She caught the fever in August, and recovered, but suffered a relapse on October 1st; she died just three days later. “The children were all so fond of Sister Frances, ” wrote one of the sisters. “Charlie goes out by himself to lay flowers on the grave, and stands looking so pitifully upon it; he is the oldest boy of the home.”

There was one final martyr of St. Mary’s. Father Louis Schuyler reported for duty in Memphis after Parsons died. Instead of staying at a hotel outside the fever district, Schuyler insisted on remaining at St. Mary’s so he could “go into the very thick of the pestilence in the lower portion of the city.” He couldn’t attend Sister Constance’s funeral because he wanted to visit some sick children in the neighborhood. After only four days of constant labor, Schuyler fell ill with fever, and died on September 17th.

The frost finally came exactly one month later, killing the mosquitos and ending the worst epidemic in our city’s history. When it was over, 200 towns and cities across the South lay wasted. Yellow fever had infected more than 100,000 people, causing some 20,000 deaths — more than 5,000 in Memphis alone. Our city, one of the hardest hit, was so devastated that it lost its charter. Another wave of yellow fever swept through the next year, with smaller epidemics every year after that, but nothing compared to the devastation of 1878. It wasn’t until 1900 that Dr. Walter Reed, an American army surgeon working in Cuba, finally discovered that mosquitos were the source of the plague.

Out of the death and chaos, the noble work performed by the priests and nuns of St. Mary’s lives on. “We say sometimes in cynical wrath that all truth and justice have departed out of this world,” said a September 25, 1878, editorial in the New York Tribune. “But those poor Sisters lying dead in Memphis are an all-sufficient refutation of our pessimistic generalities. This generous giving ought to silence, for a time at least, the snarls of the misanthropists. It is strange that so much dying should prove to us that the world is worth living in.”

Today, the massive altar in St. Mary’s Cathedral bears the names of the sisters who died in 1878 (along with Sister Hughetta, who survived the epidemic and died in 1922). A brass wall plaque and stained-glass window are further tributes to the sisters and to Parsons and Schuyler. In 1985, the Episcopal Church gave them a lasting tribute, adding “The Martyrs of Memphis, Constance and Her Companions” to the church’s Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. The feast day is observed on September 9th each year.

In Elmwood Cemetery, a simple shaft marks the double graves of both Parsons and Schuyler. Nearby, four names and dates are carved around the perimeter of a flat stone tablet: Constance, Sept. 9; Thecla, Sept. 12; Ruth, Sept. 17: Frances, Oct. 4 — the last resting place of the Martyrs of Memphis.