In December 1876, a doctor turned speaker, Charles H. Miller, stood before an audience in Lykens, Pennsylvania, reflecting on his childhood in the Coal Region.
Miller, who had grown up in Wiconisco Township during the 1850s, shared memories of his schoolhouse and classmates – but one student, lost too soon to disease, haunted his recollections.
His words, delivered to the residents of Lykens, capture the fragility of life in a time when childhood illnesses swept through schoolhouses with tragic frequency.
Miller’s description of his late schoolmate is deeply poetic and mournful:
The memory of those school days is yet with us; the charcoal frescos on the wall; the carved and battered benches; the well-heaped window-sills of hats and shawls; the rosy faces of the girls; the mischievous glances of the boys; the ink-stained desks; the water bucket in the hall!
And now again there comes before me, as of old, the form of one long since within her grave. Her laugh is joyous, ringing, and her large blue eyes sparkle with a beauty not of earth. The hectic flush is upon her cheeks, and the hollow cough tells a tale only too well-known to all.
Yet, her step is swift and airy, and her pleasures keen as any. The first within the ring, the last to depart! How strange a thing life is that a face as full of grace and beauty should bloom like a rose to-day and tomorrow fade into death. Mystery of mysteries which Time infinite and unchangeable alone can reveal.
Tonight the silent town is wrapt in darkness, and upon her grave, far up the hill-top, the stars of heaven look down!
Miller never names his young friend, but his words suggest she rests in the cemetery on the hillside overlooking Lykens, where many victims of 19th century epidemics were laid to rest.
The Coal Region’s mining towns were no strangers to epidemics, with poor sanitation, close living quarters, and limited medical care allowing illness to spread rapidly. In an era before childhood vaccinations that we take for granted, children regularly died of diseases such as measles, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and others.
For many families, the loss of children to disease was heartbreakingly common, yet no less devastating.
Read Miller’s full history of Lykens and Wiconisco
Read more about disease in the Coal Region
A vaccination campaign for schoolchildren in Schuylkill County in the 1850s
“A matter of life and death” – A reflection on the 1918-19 pandemic’s aftermath in Wilkes-Barre
A story from 1918 reveals chaos as “Spanish flu” raged through Schuylkill County
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