My paternal grandmother, Anna Holliger, was 17 years old in 1918 when the influenza and scarlet fever pandemic hit the U.S. My grandfather, Levi Keidel, was in the army (before they were married), stationed at Camp Grant, near Chicago. Scarlet fever quickly swept through the military barracks since they were kept in such close quarters. Some of the men were assigned detail making caskets. “They couldn’t make caskets and bury them fast enough. They had corpses in caskets piled high like firewood along the sides of the barracks.”

Anna’s brother Bill was in military service in Georgia. He was sick with scarlet fever, and wasn’t expected to live, so their father and brother John took the train from Central Illinois to Georgia to visit him for four days until he began to recover.

When they returned to the farm in Illinois, the family was already sick with influenza, all sleeping downstairs so their mother could care for them. Within a week their father and John fell sick with scarlet fever. He’d say to his wife, Lillian, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my stomach; it just feels like if I could scrub my insides out with a scrub brush I would feel better.” Father paced from one end of the house to the other, suffering from pain in his back. Ten days after he had returned from Georgia he went into a coma and soon died. After his death, the pocks of scarlet fever came out on his face, the first indication that their home had been infested with the disease. “The night that Daddy died we got a different doctor. He said, ‘They’re too confined here. You’ve got to get some of them upstairs and get in more help.’”

A specialist came from Peoria to examine everyone. He told Lillian that all of her family at home at the time would die except for Anna, charged her $100 and left! There were no drugs in those days. The family was put in quarantine in their own home while Lillian struggled to help the rest of her children survive. Lillian bathed everyone every day and rubbed their bodies with olive oil.

The day after father’s death, Raymond (5) and Elizabeth (12) also died of Scarlet Fever. They and their father were buried in the same grave. Within less than a week Katherine (19) and Arthur (13) died.

Anna had a bed near the window and watched the undertaker come every time there was another body to take away. “I laid in that window and saw that undertaker Foster from Deer Creek a good many times. He drove horses and a spring wagon. He’d always unhitch his horses and tie them to the back of his wagon. Then he would take a little bottle out of his pocket, whether it was pills or whatever, evidently to help keep him from picking up the bug.” Her mother was out on the porch with every one of her dead children when they took them away.

Lillian’s mother, Grandma Zimmerman, heard the news of Lillian’s family, thought of Lillian caring for the family alone, and knew they were struggling to buy their farm. In the mist of her worry, she also passed away. When they took her body to the cemetery, since the family wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, the undertaker brought the horse-drawn hearse by the front porch and opened the casket so Lillian could get one last glimpse of her mother.

Anna was sick together with Emma in the same room upstairs. Their fevers broke at the same time. Anna continued to get better, but Emma had a relapse and died one month after her father’s death.

When Anna’s temperature was normal, she came downstairs and noticed for the first time how quiet the house was with most of the family gone. Only her mother, a younger sister, and her brother who had returned from the army. Grief was especially acute when they sat at the table and noticed all the empty chairs.