...the key to the Hospital of Death...

  At the end of the 1992 field season on Rogers Island in Fort Edward I was asked by project director Dr. David Starbuck to continue on and investigate a curious feature on the southern end of the island that had turned up on the last day of excavations.  An avocational archaeologist with several years of experience, I agreed, not knowing that his request would lead to hundreds of manhours searching for the elusive smallpox hospital that had remained a mystery for two hundred years. As the crew chief of the smallpox hospital site, what I hoped to find were the fragile remains of this building where hundreds of British and colonial troops lost their lives.

    The wars for world empire between Great Britain and France in the 18th century are collectively known as the French and Indian Wars. This name was tagged especially to the last war by the people of the English colonies who bore the brunt of frequent raids along the frontier settlements of New England. Construction of Fort Edward was begun in 1755, and it eventually became the staging ground for invasions northward into French Canada by the British and provincial troops who eventually drove France out of North America. Thousands of troops encamped in and around this fort, most notably on the banks of the Hudson and on the "Great Island" adjacent to the fort.

    As with many wars, most of the casualties were not inflicted on the battlefield, but rather occurred within the close and confining quarters that a military lifestyle necessarily forced upon people. Many of the Americans gathered at Fort Edward had never been more than a few miles from home and were especially susceptible to the opportunistic viruses that ravaged their ranks. The most deadly infectious disease was smallpox. Before the advent of HIV and AIDS, smallpox decimated populations worldwide and was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. 

Aztec smallpox victims from Historia De Las Casas de Nueva Espana, Volume 4, Book 12, Lam. cliii, plate 114. at www.history.binghamton.edu/hist130/hist130.htm

The mortality rate appears to have been about 25%, and in crowded camps like those at Fort Edward, it was probably much higher. Smallpox could be contracted by a respiratory-borne virus, and coupled with other common camp "distempers" (such as dysentery and pneumonia), it acted swiftly to carry off a victim. Over 800 people probably died in the hospital we were searching for. It was not until the 1790s that Dr. Edward Jenner in England developed the first official vaccination against smallpox. This development ultimately led to smallpox being the first disease to be purposely eradicated by man, but our victims were forty years too early to benefit, and a world away. 

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