It was 1918 and the dark clouds of World War I were raining bullets and shells over Europe — a conflict that would leave 20 million people dead over four years. Another more deadly war, with a cruel more lethal enemy, also raged across the world.

No nation, state or small-town — including Butler — had an army strong enough to keep it from invading its borders. The 1918 flu pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu pandemic, most likely began its unmerciful march in the United States and not in Spain. Historians believe the microscopic killer’s worldwide path of human devastation began at Fort Riley, Kan., on March 11, 1918.

Four successive waves over the next two years would kill at least 50 million worldwide and 676,000 out of a 106 million U.S. population. Hundreds from Butler would, tragically, be included within these unimaginable statistics.

The effects of the deadly virus began to be felt in Butler on Oct. 1, 1918. Seventy-nine young “Doughboy” soldiers from Butler were ready to ride the rails on Oct. 7 and off to war. But, due to the flu spreading through the army training camps, the departure was postponed to a later date.

The first Butler flu victim was admitted to the Butler General Hospital that same day, and before the sun set again, six of its nurses were stricken, causing the nursing school graduation ceremonies to be indefinitely postponed.

On Oct. 14, after caring for a man who had died from the flu the previous week, Miss Sarah Karnes, a nurse at the hospital, was added to the rapidly growing death scroll.

The peak period of the flu epidemic in Butler would continue through the middle of November with a total of 7,877 cases of influenza and 260 deaths.

Unlike most flu, the 1918 Flu chose mostly young, healthy adults and not the very young or very old for its victims. The thousands who suffered at first experienced normal flu symptoms: sore throat, chills, fever and diarrhea.

But then could come the deadly twist — the virus ravaged its victim's lungs. Many developed severe pneumonia. Mahogany colored spots would appear on the cheeks and patients would turn blue, suffocating from a lack of oxygen as lungs filled with a frothy, bloody substance.

Sometimes within hours, patients succumbed to complete respiratory failure. Autopsies showed hard, red lungs drenched in fluid.

Butler’s City Council immediately authorized the health officer to have the authority to quarantine cases and for doctors to report the number of cases and deaths to the Board of Health, as had been requested by the state.

Many of the recommendations given by the health officer for individuals to prevent the spread were like COVID-19, including wearing masks and not gathering in large crowds.

Other recommendations, however, strike an almost comical tone to the current day reader. A sample of these were to “chew your food well,” “breathe through your nose as your mouth was not made to breathe through,” “stay cool while walking and warm at night” and “upon retiring at night to keep all clothing worn that day in a room or closet with a cloth saturated in formaldehyde and close all doors and windows to disinfect your clothes so they will be ready to wear in the morning.”

Regardless of the best preventive measures, 942 cases were reported in the first week of October, and as many as 15 people in Butler and Lyndora began to die daily.

Mrs. Howard Stibgen of 207 East Clay (Brady) Street was overcome with grief on Oct. 6 when her 23-year-old brother passed away in her home while her husband lay dead from the influenza in another room.

Meanwhile in Lyndora’s Red Row on Hansen Avenue, the daughter of Austrian immigrants, 14-year-old Annie Shinak, couldn’t escape the flu’s deadly grip that was hitting the nonnative population especially hard.

Many of these newly arrived workers for the Standard Steel Car Works (Pullman Standard) lived in unsanitary, crowded conditions in company-built housing with no indoor plumbing. These wooden, cheaply built two-story row-type houses containing six families per building along Hansen Avenue were nicknamed “Red Row'' due to the red box car-colored paint coating the clapboards. Many of the families could not read or write English and were not able to understand the information advised to protect their families from infection.

Just a short walk south in Lyndora, Austrian born 34-year-old Mary Paulas of 54 Penn Avenue was, according to the Oct. 18 edition of Butler Citizen, “despondent and delirious from caring for her husband and four children with the flu without any outside aid.” Sick herself from influenza, she was witnessing the last day of her 4-year-old son Tony’s life and could no longer cope.

It was 5 p.m. and the dinner hour, when her husband discovered her missing. Frank Paulas rose from his sick bed and gathered a group of neighbors to search for the mother of his sick children. Tragically, they found her in the Highfield area above Lyndora hanging from a tree with a noose around her neck tied from a rope she carried with her from home.

Across the Picklegate Crossing Bridge from Lyndora, along the banks of the Connoquenessing Creek in Bredinville, Slovak-speaking Josephine Sheptak lay in bed from influenza and was described in the Oct. 18 Butler Citizen edition as “out of her mind.” Her flu induced delirium inside her No. 6 Bredinville home was so extreme that it took “three men to hold her down!” She would eventually recover.

Inside Butler City, the Italian-born population residing in the East Jefferson to Center Avenue section of town, didn’t fare much better than the foreign born of Lyndora.

An Italian man with a wife and two children emotionally spoke to the Butler Citizen newspaper in broken English how this cruel virus had decimated his family. “Little guirl gone, motter, not know. Little boy gone, motter, not know. Wife sick. All me has!” Angelo Monfre, a lifelong Butler resident and well-known beautician, told me his touching personal story of the 1918 Flu Pandemic before he died in 2009.

He was just 1 year old when his 18-year-old mother, Clementino Monfre, gave birth to his little brother, Paul, on Oct. 10. Either during the last days of her pregnancy or just after delivering, she was attacked by the same influenza that had killed her mother two weeks before.

Only eight days after her baby’s birth, Clementino, who had been born in France to an Italian father and Frenchborn mother, would leave behind two children for her husband, Charles, to care for alone. Ninety years later, during the last days of Angelo Monfre’s life, his daughter, Fontaine Seezox of Butler, with emotion in her voice, told me he would “ask for his mother” that had been taken from him nearly a century before.

In 1918, the city implemented some drastic measures to fight the epidemic. They required that a police officer must go to the house after a death occurred and “prevent the congregation of people, both when the corpse remains in the house and during the hours of service.”

The men who wore the badge were also instructed to strictly enforce the “spitting on the sidewalk” ordinance and immediately arrest the violator.

Acts of vandalism were even encouraged by those riding Butler’s streetcars to gain fresh air. Understanding that the lack of ventilation spread the disease, it was suggested to break the windows of the cars if they would not open.

But the most drastic measure was an order on Oct. 3 by the state Commissioner of Health ordering all saloons, schools, churches, places of amusement, moving picture shows and where people assembled to be closed indefinitely.

The closing of schools on Oct. 4 may have come too late for Miss Clara Bartley. Clara had graduated from Westminster College in 1913 and taught English alongside five other teachers who were already infected with influenza at the yellow brick Butler High School on North McKean Street.

It seems very likely the oldest of the three adult sisters living with their parents in a stately, white clapboard house on East Pearl Street had walked the virus home with her from school one fall afternoon. Clara’s youngest sister, Mary Frances, died six days later on Oct. 10 at 1:30 a.m. in her upstairs bedroom.

One of Clara’s students, Inez Dugan, immortalized the epidemic in a poem “The Flu” she authored for the February 1919 Butler High School Magnet: (The first and last stanza)

Well, I got the influenza,

Say it is the darnesdest stuff,

Makes you feel so weak and wobbly,

No, I’m not a’pullin a bluff.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

You live on broth and medicine,

Your head’s hot — and cold your feet,

You keep gettin’ sicker and thinkin’

Saint Peter maybe you’ll meet.

Hundreds of Dugan’s classmates had been infected and recovered from “the darnesdest stuff,” but sadly Margaret Patterson, Francis Hutzley and Grace Criner would not survive to walk across the stage wearing a black cap and tassel at graduation in the spring.

The start of November had shown new cases decreasing to 300 and deaths had fallen to four during a 24-hour period compared to 15 deaths during the same 24-hour period the previous week.

The city leaders also mistakenly believed the freezing temperatures, which were causing an “inch of ice in buckets left outside of homes,” was preventing the spread of the virus.

The disappearing flu, along with approval from the state Commissioner of Health granting permission for towns to lift the “lockdown,” allowed schools and theaters to reopen Nov. 11, 1918. Theater owners were required to remove “sneezers and coughers.”

Nov. 11 was truly a day to celebrate! The day began at 4 a.m. with the sounding of the fire whistle by Mayor Heinenman announcing the long-awaited news of the signing of the Armistice creating a truce between the Allies and Germany ending fighting on the Western front of World War I.

Now with the town reopening and knowing the boys would be coming home from war, a parade was needed to celebrate. The largest parade in Butler’s history was held that evening at 7 p.m. Young women marched using pots and pans they clanged together like cymbals while young boys dragged pots and kettles by strings behind them to bang out the good news!

Six-thousand workers from Standard Steel Car Works (Pullman Standard) and Forged Steel Wheel (Armco Steel) marched by departments pulling floats beginning at Broad Street and continuing to Penn Street, and turning south on a Main Street. The route was lined with thousands of flu and war weary families ready to celebrate their newfound freedoms.

A gruesome parade float with the Kaiser and his six sons hung in effigy brought cheers of retribution and deafening applause from the adrenaline-filled flag-waving crowd!

A diminished toll from the 1918 Flu would continue for most of the next year throughout the United States and Butler County, with pockets of outbreaks lasting into 1920, until disappearing due to the development of herd immunity.

Every small hamlet in Butler County from Mars to Saxonburg and Harrisville to Herman had suffered from the silent enemy. Although the Flu Pandemic of 1918 might have been over, its effects would be felt for years and maybe generations.

Butler’s 260 deaths from influenza created 88 orphaned children. Instead of growing up in a loving household, these children made their homes in various orphanages. At least one of these little waifs, however, was lucky. A little girl, just shy of 3 years of old, who was described in the Jan. 29, 1919, Butler Citizen edition as “sweet faced,” was adopted and given the new name of Mildred Josephine Cole by her overjoyed and childless parents Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Cole of Race Street.

The only permanent reminder of this catastrophic event in Butler County is a roadside historical marker just north of West Winfield Township explaining the burial site of several hundred mostly Polish and Slovak immigrants who worked in the nearby limestone mines, brick works, and sand and tile plants. There was reportedly as many as 20 mostly single men per grave.

Father O’Callahan of nearby St. John’s Catholic Church in Coylesville had a large wooden cross erected from railroad ties to mark the grave site of the nameless victims in what has been forever known as the Wooden Cross Cemetery.

Bill May is a local historian, speaker and guide.