FLETCHER — On a sunny afternoon last week, Nancy Cardinal and Alan Cary were on the porch of the Fletcher General Store doing what many people are doing these days: talking about the coronavirus.
Cardinal, who runs the store, sat in an upholstered chair while Cary leaned on a post nearby. Neither was aware of any Covid-19 cases in town — and they would know. “Gossip is really big in this town,” Cardinal said. “Everybody knows everything about everybody — or at least they think they do.”
Vermont Department of Health data confirms that the Franklin County town of roughly 1,300 people still has zero cases so far. But Fletcher sticks out for an even more enviable public health record: it was one of just a handful of communities in the United States that dodged the deadly influenza outbreak of 1918, commonly known as the Spanish flu.
“There were plenty of rural counties and towns in the U.S. that were hard hit” in 1918, said Alex Navarro, assistant director at the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. Diseases tend to hit population centers first, he said, “but being a rural town or county was not a guarantee that you’re not going to get hit by the epidemic as well.”
Vermont had more than 40,000 cases during the 1918 pandemic. But Fletcher only had two known cases of the disease and no deaths.
Why was Fletcher spared? Navarro said it’s not entirely clear: “Fletcher was simply lucky, probably because they were so rural and so isolated.”
At the general store, neither Cardinal nor Cary had heard about this chapter of the town’s history. But they agreed that isolation probably played a role. “A lot of people stay to themselves in Fletcher,” Cardinal said.
A century ago, she said, Fletcher was mainly an agricultural community. That’s still true today. There are two sizable dairy farms, and many families make extra income from maple sugaring. “I don’t think there’s a piece of property in this town that doesn’t have lines on it,” Cardinal said.
She guessed that the farmer’s lifestyle — home-bound and mostly outdoors — kept Fletcher from catching flu cases. “It’s very simple out here,” she said. “We kind of live in our own little world.”
Jon Bondy, chair of the town’s Selectboard, thinks mostly in terms of transportation. (“There’s only one issue, and that’s roads,” he said of the Selectboard’s work.) No state routes run through the main part of town, Bondy noted. Fletcher is so spread out, he said, that it hardly has a town center at all; the town offices, elementary school and grange are all farther than walking distance apart.
“Anyone who goes to Fletcher is going to Fletcher,” said Barry Doolan, the town moderator and a trustee of the local historical society. “It’s not on the way to any place.”
An ‘escape community’
Navarro began researching the 1918 pandemic in 2005, when the U.S. Department of Defense, and then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asked his team to study the effectiveness of “nonpharmaceutical interventions,” like quarantine and social distancing requirements, on previous influenza outbreaks.
The first wave of the Spanish flu turned out to be a “herald wave” for the true crisis ahead, Navarro said.
It began as a less deadly strain of the H1N1 flu in the spring of 1918, but it mutated to a more deadly variation in the summer. Mobilization during World War I spread it further. “You have troops embarking for the European war, but you also have mobilization across the United States,” he said.
“It breaks down in the military camps first, and then because lots of these camps are close to American cities and there’s lots of interaction with civilians … you get civilian cases shortly thereafter,” he said.
Camp Devens in Massachusetts became the site of an outbreak that spread across the Northeast and then across the nation with surprising speed. By September, Denver was reporting cases.
The Spanish flu ultimately killed 675,000 people in the United States and lingered for years. Navarro, however, had a different focus in mind when he began researching the pandemic: What places did not get hit?
After poring through historical reports and archives, his team found only eight places they deemed “escape communities” — places that had escaped the worst of the pandemic’s toll. Of those, only two were whole towns. One was Fletcher.
Navarro compared Fletcher to Gunnison, Colorado, another escape community. Gunnison sat in a county that barricaded its roads and monitored train travel in order to completely isolate its citizens from the pandemic.
Fletcher did nothing of the sort.
One incident during the pandemic seemed to tempt fate. Fletcher hosted a 120-person wedding for a soldier recently returned from Camp Devens just as the outbreak at the base reached new heights. “They were lucky that they didn’t all contract influenza,” Navarro said.
“Fletcher didn’t do anything other than what the state required them to do,” he said. According to his research, Vermont was ahead of most other states in declaring influenza a “contagious and infectious disease,” which expanded the State Board of Health’s authority. Gov. Horace Graham enacted a statewide ban on public gatherings about a month later.
Today, Fletcher — like 116 other towns in Vermont — does not report any Covid-19 cases. But most of the towns around it have, including hard-hit St. Albans, the site of 63 cases inside the Northwest State Correctional Facility.
“It’s incumbent upon local health officials to look at what’s happening in their region,” Navarro said. “On the other hand, it definitely behooves rural communities to think about the prospects that they may have an epidemic or a hotspot. It only takes one person that comes in.”
Vermont’s first epidemic
A few decades before the 1918 flu pandemic, Vermont became the epicenter of a different epidemic, one that hit rural communities particularly hard.
The first major outbreak of polio in the United States began in Vermont in 1894. The disease killed 18 and left 58 paralyzed in the state, including many infants and children.
According to contemporary reports by public health official Dr. Charles Caverly, polio had repeated resurgences in the summers of 1914-1918, causing seemingly random hotspots in towns and even within neighborhoods. (Here, too, Fletcher seemed to be spared — Board of Health data shows no evidence of cases in the town.)
Although a broader understanding of viruses was limited at the time and a vaccine for polio was decades away, Vermont public health officials understood enough about outbreaks to implement social distancing policies.
In response to a cluster of cases in Montpelier in 1917, the Barre City board of health passed a law prohibiting public gatherings, including “schools, Sunday schools, churches, theaters, picnics, ball games, first class saloons, lodge meetings, club rooms, pool rooms, soda fountains and ice cream parlors, if ice cream is to be consumed on premises.”
Writing in support of social distancing laws, Caverly said Barre’s actions had limited the spread of polio at a time when people were expecting it to be hard-hit. “With free communication by way of steam cars, trolley and highway, it was naturally expected Barre would have cases of the disease early,” Caverly said.
After the order, “only 16 cases were reported in the city,” he said. “Barre City’s comparative exemption from the disease is undoubtedly due to the stringent measures adopted by the local board.”
Caverly went on to serve as the State Board of Health president before dying of the Spanish flu while trying to contain the pandemic in 1918.
How Covid-19 compares
On Friday, the Department of Health released its latest round of town-by-town Covid-19 data, showing that at least 140 towns of the 256 in Vermont have had one or more Covid-19 cases.
It also reveals that some counties have had Covid-19 spread far more than their total cases would make it appear. Addison County, only fourth in the state in its rate of Covid-19 per 10,000 people, is second in the number of its towns that have had at least one case.
Meanwhile, broad swaths of the Northeast Kingdom have yet to report a single case of Covid-19 and continue to have the lowest rates in the state.
Will every town in the state eventually get Covid-19? Vermont has managed to curb the number of new cases, leading state officials to declare that Vermont has flattened the curve and is ready to reopen. The number of new towns with a Covid-19 case has declined since the health department started publishing the data in April.
But experts have warned that Vermont’s experience with Covid-19 isn’t over. The timeline for development of a Covid-19 vaccine is still uncertain with little definitive progress. There are predictions of a second wave elsewhere in the country.
Alex Navarro, the University of Michigan researcher, said data from the 1918 flu pandemic shows that “early, layered, and sustained” interventions, such as social distancing rules and mask orders, were effective at curbing the spread in local areas. Most states have instituted early and layered measures for Covid-19, he said — but as they look to reopen, states are ignoring the benefits of sustaining those measures for longer periods.
“There’s a small group of people … that are saying, ‘1918, we survived that, so let’s just move forward,’” he said. “We did survive 1918, but 650-675,000 Americans died when the population was a third of what it is today.”
Navarro sees parallels to the 1918 pandemic in the reluctance, indifference and defiance of some people to take strong action to prevent deaths.
“I fear that although the historical contexts are different,” he said, “human nature may not change all that much.”
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