OTISFIELD — The 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic pitted church and government leaders against each other in Lewiston, may have killed at least several Civil War veterans in Otisfield and took the lives of up to 50 million people worldwide.

These issues and others will be discussed when the Otisfield Historical Society presents “The 1918 Flu Pandemic, in Maine and Beyond” at 7 p.m. Sept. 29 at the Otisfield town office.

“The flu was an inconvenient truth. If you owned a bar or restaurant (or other public meeting place) you liked to say this was not a problem,” said Henry Hamilton, an Otisfield native and president of the Otisfield Historical Society.

Hamilton said he became interested in the subject several years ago after interviewing G. Howard Dyer, then 90 years old and Otisfield’s oldest resident, about his family’s experience with the influenza.

“Although Howard told me that the epidemic of 1918 killed off all nine remaining Civil War veterans in town,” Hamilton said, “it appears that for once Howard wasn’t quite accurate. But it’s a complicated story.”

Hamilton said his talk will be about how Otisfield was affected, based on the small amount of data available. “The worst of it didn’t get here,” he said. “It happened in three different phases with each getting worse.”

Hamilton said part of his presentation will also involve his role-playing a monsignor in Lewiston and that priest’s fight with city officials who wanted to shut down all public meeting places, including churches, in September 1918.

“People pretty much ignored that,” he said.

According to newspaper accounts of that time, by September 1918 the Spanish flu had hit every state in the union. Churches, movie theaters, mills, schools and other places where the public gathered were closed in many states in an attempt to stop the spread of the flu. Draft calls were even canceled as World War I raged on.

On Oct. 1, 1918, the Lewiston Journal was reporting that local officials expected between 400 and 500 cases of the Spanish influenza, but only 30 cases had been reported to the boards of health in Auburn and 22 in Lewiston.

But physicians were telling the newspaper that they were treating 20 or 30 cases a day and in one case a doctor said he was too busy treating influenza patients to even tally the numbers.

One doctor said there should be “no delay” in closing schools, churches, theaters and other meeting places.

Several cities had placed bans on public gatherings and in Portland public funerals were banned.

By Oct. 7, the French Catholic Church and Protestant churches in Lewiston and Auburn remained closed, according to local newspaper accounts.  An open-air service had been planned at other churches, but because of a storm the services were brought inside, although some were cut in length. The Board of Health met to talk about banning the church services, which they had the authority to do, but decided against it.

“I think people should be remembering,” Hamilton said. It is not taught in schools today, despite the fact that the flu killed more people than all American wars combined, he said.

The program is free and open to the public. People who have family stories about the pandemic are invited to share them at that time.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

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