The Scourge of Childhood
“Anamosa, Iowa, is having a terrible experience with diphtheria. There are several hundred cases there and many deaths have occurred. All the public schools have been closed, the Sunday-schools discontinued and religious services suspended. The town is practically quarantined…. It was recommended that the Mayor designate houses where the diphtheria was, and that boys and girls be kept off the streets.”
Iola (KS) Register, 31 Jan 1879 pg. 1
Diphtheria is a bacterial respiratory infection which attacks tissue in the lungs, the dead tissue then collecting in the larynx to make breathing and swallowing increasingly difficult. Children, with smaller and more delicate airways, are especially vulnerable. By the late 1800s it was alternately called “the scourge of childhood”, “the children’s plague”, and “the strangling angel,”1 and newspapers were rife with obituaries, reports of outbreaks, and advertisements for purported preventatives and cures. Effective vaccines were not developed until the 1890s.
Betsy Grayson Croan
Betsy Grayson 321, granddaughter of a Virginia Revolutionary War Patriot, was born around 1802 in Greenup, Kentucky. She married Thomas Croan in 1820. The Croans farmed and grew their family in nearby Carter County. In the mid-1850s, newly-widowed Betsy and her ten Croan offspring joined extended family first in Missouri and then in Kansas, where Betsy died in 1865.
Hannah Croan Covert
In October 1860, 18-year old Hannah Croan, Betsy’s eighth child, married 27-year old farmer Elias Covert in Jefferson County, Kansas. Hannah bore 9 children in 16 years, five girls and four boys.
Four Identical Stones
In late April, 1879, the Covert home in Ottawa County was visited by the children’s plague. Elias and Hannah’s ninth child Thomas was the first to succumb on May 4. He was three years old. Five-year old Victoria died on May 15, 9-year old Isabel on May 17, and 11-year old John on May 27. Four nearly identical stones at Highland Cemetery in Minneapolis, Kansas, attest to the names, dates of death, and ages. The fifth afflicted child, possibly 7-year old Henry or 13-year old Sarah, survived the childhood scourge, at least initially.
1880 Census
The census taken just over one year after the sudden deaths of the four children hints at more bad news. Elias and his five surviving children are listed, but Hannah’s name was crossed out. Where was she?
A Grieving Mother
An 1880 census appendix entitled “Supplemental Schedules… for the Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes” starts the tragic tale. Hannah had been an indigent patient at the Topeka State Asylum for the previous year.2 Fourteen-year old daughter Sarah died soon after the 1880 census, and an undated news clipping posted to Ancestry.com reports: “Notice was received from superintendent of state insane asylum, that Hannah Covert was discharged, not cured.”
No further documentation was found until the 1900 Census. Elias, Hannah, and 28-year old Henry, an unmarried grocery clerk, were once again together, living in the same Minneapolis, Kansas house where four (probably five) of Hannah’s nine children had died two decades earlier.
Family Disintegration
By 1902, Henry and the two surviving Covert girls had married, both the latter having moved to the west. Husband Elias died in Minneapolis in December 1905. Interestingly, two different obituaries noted his four surviving children, but neither mentioned his grieving wife. Forty-one year-old son James died in Oklahoma Territory in 1906, the sixth child Hannah outlived.
Wichita
In 1908, 66-year old Hannah Covert was designated a “feeble-minded person” in newspaper legal announcements. Despite continuing to live with her son Henry, then a carpenter in Wichita with three children, Hannah was assigned a state-appointed guardian who sold off her property in Minneapolis to pay for her care.3
The last documentation we find for Hannah (wid. Elias) is in the 1912 Wichita city directory. She is about 70 years old, and boarding in the N. Wabash Ave. home of her son Henry, “lab Wichita Stk Yds Co.” When Henry’s wife Irene died in early 1916, he and his five young children joined his two sisters out west, where Henry died in 1949. Details regarding the death and burial of his poor mother Hannah are unknown.
Feature image: Connie Langvardt via FindaGrave.com
1 Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, “Diphtheria Treatments and Prevention” https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/antibody-initiative/diphtheria accessed 2 May 2025
2 Of interest, Hannah’s older sister, 41-year old Fannie Croan Boyer 3217, appears on the same 1880 supplemental schedule. She is boarding with a Jefferson County, Kansas family at county expense, separated from her re-married husband and their four children who were living upriver in Missouri. Fannie is suffering from “Melancholia,” and had previously spent two years at the Osawatomie State Asylum. The onset of her affliction is dated to 1870, but no reason is given. In 1900, 61-year old Fannie is residing at the Jefferson County Alms House in Ozawkie. She died in 1919 at the Topeka State Asylum at age 80.
3 clippings dated 28 Oct 1908 and 4 Dec 1908 from unspecified Wichita, Kansas newspaper via. Ancestry.com
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