Green Mountain Freeman

Great Sickness in Holliston, One Hundred years ago.

While on a recent visit to the town of Holliston, in Middlesex county, I learned a fact connected with its earlier history which may not be entirely uninteresting to some of your readers. Between December 18, 1753, and January 30, 1754, the town was visited by what has appropriately been called the Great Sickness.—The symptoms of the disease, as described in the journal of the then clergyman of the place were, violent pleuritic pains, fever, and a difficulty of expectoration which terminated in strangulation. During the progress of the disease, the mind of the sufferer was wholly free from derangement. Death succeeded every attack, but two, in the course of three or four days.

The population of the town, at the time, was a little less than 400. In the short space of six weeks, more than one-eighth of the number died. Seven lay unburied one day, and ten on another. Few families escaped bereavement, and several were entirely swept away by the plague. Although those in health employed their whole time in assisting the afflicted, they were not sufficiently numerous to take proper care of the sick and dying, and to bury the dead.

The most striking circumstances connected with this awful visitation were the narrowness of the limits within which it was confined, and the absence of any apparent natural cause.

A hundred years have passed away since that fearful calamity. During that time the town has increased in population six fold, and has become noted for its enterprise, and for being the seat of one of the finest academies in New England. And it is a proof of the deep impression which that event made upon those who survived it, that at the distance of three generations, amid the noise attendant upon the highest prosperity, nothing is the subject of more frequent allusion.

—Traveller