Snow Scenes

The Easton Library snow scene. In the photo is custodial worker Andrew J. Shaneberger and friend. Those who knew Jane Moyer, this was her father.

A beautiful snow scene at Lafayette College

In Memory of Jeanne Cheston and Adele Hartman

In Memory of

Jeanne Cheston & Adele Hartman

Adele Hartman

Jeanne Cheston

                                              

With a sad heart we say good bye to two wonderful Volunteers in the Marx Room that recently passed.

Between Jeanne and Adele they added more than 90 genealogy books to the Marx Room.

Their legacy will live on in the Marx Room and to the many they helped.

In Memory of Adele Sandt Hartman

In Memory of 

Adele Sandt Hartman

Adele was an amazing volunteer in the 

Marx Room for many years.

Adele did over 38 books of Church Records, Cemeteries, and Family Histories for the Marx Room.

Her legacy will live on in the Marx Room and to the many she helped.

 

THE PIGGERY

By Rory Morgan - 2019

“Let us raise hogs, more hogs and still more hogs.” 

So said one H.S. Rice, in a letter to the Easton Daily Free Press, published on February 14, 1918. His letter was part of a campaign to persuade Easton to allow the raising of pigs within the city limits. (Rice was actually a resident of Wilson Township, but apparently felt free to tell his Easton neighbors how to manage their city.)

The subject was debated at a City Council meeting, where citizens spoke both for and against the idea. Dr. J.J. Condran firmly opposed the idea and noted that “we are not living in Martin’s Creek or Glendon, but in the City of Easton”. He further noted that Easton was already “having trouble daily” with the residents of certain neighborhoods “keeping chickens in the cellar.”

 Arguing in favor of the idea, a Mr. Van Syckle said that those opposed to the idea should “get out into the country, where they could smell a few hog pens; they would get some color into their cheeks instead of sitting around looking like a ghost.” The Free Press reporter dryly remarked that “To whom this elegant piece of verbal sarcasm had reference was not stated.”

The campaign to allow residents to raise pigs was not unique to Easton. The United States had been actively involved in World War I for almost a year. For various reasons, a severe shortage of pork developed - which, of course, resulted in a dramatic price increase. The obvious solution was to increase the supply of pork across the country - the question was to do that.

The “municipal piggery” was one solution. A number of smaller cities around the country had begun to raise hogs as a municipal function. Edible garbage was fed to the pigs, rather than being incinerated, thus reducing the garbage disposal cost. The fattened pigs were sold to meatpackers, generating income.

Lafayette College professor Dr. Edward Hart became a strong advocate of the piggery concept. He led a delegation from Easton’s influential Rotary club to Worcester, MA, to evaluate that city’s piggery operation. The committee returned with a favorable report and assured Council that there were “no highfalutin ideas in vogue there”, and that “no attempt is made to wash the faces of the porkers or to spray them with cologne.”

Additional support for the piggery came from Henry F. Marx, the respected head of Easton Library. He strongly endorsed the concept and urged Eastonians to see it as a patriotic duty in wartime. In fact, he said,  “we ought to be able to stand a little odor of pigs when we think of our boys in the trenches.”

The piggery issue wasn’t the first time that Easton ended up chasing its tail over garbage. In the early 1900s, cities across the country began to look at ways to improve their haphazard methods of handling garbage. At the time, much of Easton’s garbage ended up in the river or wherever else residents felt like dumping it. Easton decided that systematically collecting the garbage and hauling it to a central municipal incinerator would be a better approach.

While the idea seemed simple, the process of executing it seemed to grind on forever. There were various incinerators on the market. The process of choosing one became - unsurprisingly - complicated by local politics.

 A meeting was described by a newspaper as consisting of “long, senseless squabbles” over the “most trivial details. At one point, a member of Council noted that the necessary decisions were no closer than ever after 21 meetings. Another speaker compared buying incinerators to buying a pair of shoes; he didn’t really know much about them but he thought that he could pick out a good one. A prominent businessman proposed that rather than burning the city’s garbage, it should just be mixed with some cement to make building blocks.

A 35-ton (per day), coal-fired model was finally chosen. The city bought property near today’s Highlands Boulevard and erected the incinerator and its 125-foot smokestack. Mules and  wagons were purchased to collect and haul the garbage. Men were hired to operate the incinerator and coal was purchased to fuel it. In  September, 1910, the burning of garbage finally began.

The project cost about $40,000. The original incinerator ran for about 15 years, but by 1926, there was a need for a new one. A 100-ton unit was selected and constructed - without the drama of the original project.

No one expected the garbage question to again be front and center in a few years. But, thanks to the war, it was; decisions about the piggery had to be made. There was talk of locating it in the lower part of Hackett Park, Ultimately, though, the city bought a 95-acre farm in Williams Township, for $6,500 and about a mile south of the incinerator. (It was in the vicinity of what is now a farm and a mobile home park.) The first pigs arrived in May, 1918.

Just six months later, the war ended. The pressure on pork prices was quickly reduced, as was the influence of “patriotic duty”. By 1920, although the pig population had reached 150-200 and a first-year profit of $2,000 was reported, the city’s enthusiasm for the operation was dimming. An analysis showed that the piggery needed a significant investment to thrive; Easton believed that it could not afford it.

In early 1922, the city went out of the pig business.The property was added to the city’s park system, with the name of South Delaware Park. In 1947, Easton sold it at auction to the Jacksonian Democratic Association; the pigs became a distant memory.

The incinerator continued to operate until about 1960, when the city transitioned to a landfill approach. It sat unused until 1972, when Easton sold the 31-acre property to the developer of The Highlands community.

Municipalities have struggled with waste disposal for a century. Landfills create controversy; as do incinerators. Recycling reduces waste, but doesn’t eliminate it. Pigs can't eat plastic, so piggeries are unlikely to return to popularity. And so the search for a solution will continue.

Thanks to Easton City Clerk Tom Hess for his assistance in preparing this article.

Easton Incinerator

DEATH IN THE AIR - EASTON AND THE INFLUENZA PANDEMIC OF 1918

By Rory Morgan - 2019

There’s a term in the field of public health - “Patient Zero” -  that identifies the first person known to present the symptoms of a widespread illness.

On March 11, 1918, in the midst of World War 1, an Army private named Albert M. Gitchell went to the medical facility at his Kansas base and reported himself as sick. Dozens more soldiers with similar symptoms followed him that day, but since he was the first, he earned the dubious honor of being Patient Zero for the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Gitchell recovered and lived for another fifty years; there is no record of whether he knew of his spot in medical history.

The cause of the pandemic (a pandemic is an epidemic that spreads worldwide) was an H1N1 influenza virus. It likely originated in birds, possibly passed through the pig population, and then crossed over to humans. The public generally referred to it as the Spanish flu, although Spain actually had no more to do with it than any other country.

Even though most victims recovered in time, some of those affected died within a day of becoming sick. High fever and heavy, even explosive, nosebleeds were common.  Pneumonia frequently developed. Autopsies revealed unusual lung damage, which led some doctors to describe the illness as “purulent bronchitis.” Sometimes a condition known as “heliotrope cyanosis” was seen, meaning that the patient’s face turned blue. Doctors tried to understand what they were facing, but were handicapped by the fact that science knew next to nothing about viruses. They did realize that this particular influenza was especially deadly for the young, otherwise-healthy, patients who contracted it.

The visibility of the illness decreased during the spring and early summer of 1918, but then suddenly increased as autumn approached. The war had created an ideal environment for a medical disaster; thousands upon thousands of young soldiers were crowded into training camps in the US, or were jammed into troopships headed for France. They took the virus with them to Europe, where it spread to the soldiers who were already there.

Corporal Robert Bitzer of Easton had been in France since July of 1917. He had recovered from a minor combat wound, but couldn’t avoid the virus and died on October 15, 1918. Sergeant Guy Fessenden, an Easton resident, arrived in France a year after Bitzer, in July, 1918. A month later, he wrote to his mother and told her that he had a slight case of “grippe” (an old word for influenza), but that she shouldn’t worry. He was wrong; on August 20, he died in an Army hospital in Joinville, France.

Servicemen who were still in the U.S.brought the virus home with them when they visited. As they walked around town seeing their friends, they deposited the invisible H1N1 bugs wherever they went. The reverse was also true, as healthy parents and others visited soldiers at their bases and picked up the virus. Easton’s Ruth Johnson, for example, visited her husband, Ralph, at his base in Maryland. She soon became ill and returned home, in serious condition. (She survived.)

As September rolled into October, the military’s sick lists grew. Local soldiers died in their camps. They included J. Fred Arnold of McCartney Street, who died while waiting to embark for France. R. J. Swackhammer, a Lehigh Street grocer, died at Camp Lee, VA, as did Roy Sandt, employed before the war at Easton Brass and Machine. Floyd Weaver, previously a chauffeur for Easton merchant Solomon R. Bush, was another Camp Lee victim. (Weaver’s will proved to be newsworthy. It stated that he wanted only the legally-required minimum to go to his “good-for-nothing wife Katie and her aggregation, which made life a hell for me.”)

The Army’s Chief of Staff, Easton native General Peyton C. March, felt compelled to point out that every soldier who died in camp or in transit died in service of his country, just as much as one who died in combat.

At home, things were going from bad to worse. So many telephone operators were sick that Bell Telephone asked the public to limit calls to emergencies only. Some local cemeteries reported that the increased number of deaths and the sickness of laborers caused great difficulty in digging graves for funerals. There was a shortage of caskets. Fraternal organizations, which offered their members financial assistance when ill, reported that the situation was having a dire effect on their treasuries. There was discussion of converting the Armory into a temporary hospital. Industry was crippled by the number of sick workers. Hundreds upon hundreds of children were absent from school. Edith Slutter, a 30-year-old teacher, taught one day and died the next.

The community realized that person-to-person contact spread the disease. One Eastonian reportedly proposed that “There ought to be a law allowing a man to punch a person in the jaw if he coughs in your face.” Doctors and city officials hoped that a less-radical solution could be found. Working in cooperation with the state health department, the city ordered public places to be closed: the schools, the theaters, the ice cream parlors, the hotels - all went dark and silent. The Library closed. Not even religious observances were exempt as church services were cancelled.

Finally, the number of reported new cases began to drop. On October 17, there were 111;

on October 25, there were 49; on October 29, only four new cases were reported. The Express of November 1, 1918, noted that no new cases were reported - although deaths continued, for a while, among those who had become sick earlier.

The full effect of the pandemic will never be known, but there are estimates that it caused between 20 million and 50 million deaths around the world, and hundreds of deaths in the Lehigh Valley. Hopefully, our increased knowledge and improved technology will keep the next one from paralyzing our life as the last one did.

Bell Telephone Notice

Easton Cemetery. His body was brought from France in 1921.

Camp Funston, KS - where Patient Zero was stationed