Nelson said a recent Herald article about the City Detention Hospital brought back memories of the building that was known as the “quarantine house” or, more commonly, the “pest house.”
Built in 1905, the facility sequestered patients with communicable diseases such as typhoid fever, smallpox, diphtheria and, most likely, the Spanish flu in 1917-18. It is located near the northeast corner of the intersection of DeMers Avenue and Washington Street in Grand Forks.
Nelson's uncle, Elmer Thompson, was a patient there when he died in 1918, she said. Elmer was a brother to her father, Oscar Thompson. The family lived on a farm north of East Grand Forks, said Nelson, 87.
Her grandmother, Johanna Thompson, was not allowed to visit Elmer in person.
“Grandma would stand outside there and wave to him -- just like they’re doing now” at area nursing home facilities where family members and other visitors are banned during the coronavirus pandemic, she said. “I think that’s interesting.”
Elmer Thompson was 21 when he died, said Nelson, a longtime resident and retired home economics teacher in Roseau.
“He must have been (at the pest house) for at least a year,” she said. “He was there a long time.”
His illness was misdiagnosed as a contagious disease, Nelson said. “He died from pneumonia -- that was diagnosed after his death.”
Now as a resident of an assisted living facility in Roseau, Nelson said she and other residents have something in common with quarantined patients of the distant past. They are confined and cannot have visitors.
“If we leave our apartments, we have to put on face masks just to walk in the hall,” she said. “They’re fussy about that here, which is good.”
The residents do not dine together; their meals are brought to each apartment, as is “afternoon coffee,” she said.
But, thankfully, everyone is doing fine, “that’s the main thing,” she said. “We’ll get through this, too.”
Another reader, Bonita Shambaugh, 80, Grand Forks, recalled her own brush with a pest house after contracting a case of scarlet fever at age 6 in 1945.
Shambaugh, who grew up on a farm west of Fargo, said, “there wasn’t a case of scarlet fever within 50 miles of the farm. My parents had no idea how I got it.”
“I just remember I had extremely high fever, and I didn’t know anybody for a while,” she said.
“The doctor said, 'if you don’t let anyone in (the house), she can stay here.' He thought the care at home would be better than at the pest house.”
The pest house in Fargo resembles, in design and floor plan, the Grand Forks facility, said Susan Caraher, coordinator for the Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission. She and other local historians are researching the Grand Forks facility to prepare a nomination for listing it on the National Register of Historic Places.
Shambaugh also noted that her adoptive father’s mother died from Spanish flu, probably in 1918, but information is “kind of scant,” she said. “He was only 7 when his mother died.”
The deadly influenza pandemic is estimated to have taken 50 million lives from 1918 to 1920 and infected about 500 million people, roughly a quarter of the world’s population at the time.
Shambaugh said her personal experience with several childhood diseases instilled in her the importance of vaccinations.
“With my daughter, I made sure she had every vaccine available,” she said. “The only thing that wasn’t available was chicken pox, at the time.”
Her daughter did contract chicken pox, later, as a college student, as did several of her classmates, she said.
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April 25, 2020 at 11:00PM
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Readers recall memories of 'pest house,' quarantine in early 1900s - Grand Forks Herald
"House" - Google News
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