Huntingdon's Typhoid Winter

On December 24, 1918, the State Department of Health received word of what appeared to be a threatened epidemic of typhoid fever in Huntingdon. Dr. B. Franklin Royer, the acting commissioner of health, sent one of the department's sanitary engineers to make a thorough investigation of the borough's water supply. The Harrisburg Telegraph said that supply had long been considered dangerous, because the Huntingdon authorities depended entirely upon chemical treatment of the water. Every citizen of Huntingdon was warned to boil all water until the source of infection was found.

By January 8, 1919, a Telegraph headline said the typhoid outbreak at Huntingdon had claimed five. The department had sent a large quantity of vaccine to Huntingdon for free use among the poor, and several trained nurses and sanitary engineers from the Health Department were in the borough, doing everything possible to check the epidemic.

Two days later the Democratic Watchman in Bellefonte reported eight new cases, making a total of sixty-five, or about one for every hundred of Huntingdon's inhabitants. The cause, the paper said, was believed to be the borough's water, which came from a creek draining what it called a purely farming community of twenty-five miles. The pollution was blamed on a typhoid case in the suburbs. A chief nurse from the State Health Department had arrived and was in charge.

Word of the outbreak reached the state about seven weeks after it had scheduled its influenza closing ban to be lifted in Huntingdon County, at noon on November 8, 1918.

Checked 2026-10-31 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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