Times Observer photo by Josh Cotton Two daughters of Judge William Brown died within a week of each other in 1878, both due to typhoid fever. “It is hard to understand such deaths as these,” a local paper wrote. “Hard to conceive how human nature can support such a terrible double-blow.

By JOSH COTTON

jcotton@timesobserver.com

Why do the young and the fair and the gifted die?

Why are those for whom life opens so full of promise and pleasure and usefulness, suddenly taken “over there,” while the poor and the old and the infirm, to whom life is already a burden, linger along for years “weary and heavy laden?”

We pretend not to tell.

Photo from the Warren Mail A clip from the Warren Mail that detailed how two young ladies were going to go “over there” to Oakland Cemetery just days apart in 1878.

Some time the veil may be parted and we shall know.

Those were the opening lines of a story in the Warren Mail on Sept. 24, 1878.

The Warren Ledger four days later gave the first glimpse into what in our day continues to be a communal struggle – the death of someone young.

“Accidents are liable to happen, and death is ever in some household,” the Ledger reported. “But this week we have more bad news to record than usually happens to a quiet town like Warren. The steamboat accident produced a shock to all our citizens, and the account went quickly over the country.”

More on the steamboat accident in this space in a coming addition.

The Ledger reported that Judge William Brown’s young daughter – Hattie, described as a “sprightly, winning girl, just blossoming into womanhood – the idol of her parents and friend” – had died.

More bad news was expected in the family.

“Mary Brown, an older sister, a young lady of great promise, is now lying at the point of death and mostly like before this paper reaches its readers she, too, will be numbered with the dead.”

The Ledger was right.

“These things break up households – makes them desolate, and the sad remembrance will last through time,” the Ledger proclaimed. “But these things have to be met. They are stubborn realities …. The dear ones are separated from us, and the sweet remembrance of what they were is all that is left.

The sisters – Mary was 20 and Hattie 13 – were buried together “over there.”

That’s a reference to Oakland Cemetery. In the 1870s, the south side was largely undeveloped as it was only accessible via bridge in the early 1870s.

The cemetery had been established, though, a decade earlier. The trip was referred to as “over there” or “over the river,” which certainly presents some symbolism along with it.

The Mail’s report four days later – these papers were published weekly at the time – confirmed the death of Mary, as well, who was buried on what would have been her 21st birthday.

“It was a bright, beautiful, gladsome September day,” the Mail reported. “Yet a thoughtful, tearful throng followed the fever-wasted form of Mary Brown “over the river,” to rest in the Oakland city of the dead – to rest under the pines where the Autumn winds whisper ‘all is well.'”

“‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust'” is repeated once and again, in a single family, in a single week.”

The cause of death for both sisters was typhoid fever.

It’s a disease that has largely faded out of the American consciousness as sanitation improved throughout the 20th century and antibiotics were developed.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, the disease spreads when the fecal matter of an infected person enters water or food.

The disease continues to be a significant threat world-wide, though, as nine million people get sick with typhoid annually and 100,000 people die, according to the World Health Organization.

“Beautiful flowers graced the pulpit… with the drapery of black around the choir, in which her sweet voice will be heard no more,” the Mail reported regarding Mary’s funeral. “Apparently she was sweetly slumbered in her white graduation dress amid the flowers with which the hand of affection had tried to add to her womanly beauty.

“It seems very sad – very hard – for the living. Who or want can fill the great void in a father and a mother’s heart? Who or what can fill that vacant chair – those two vacant chairs? Who or what can chase away the darkness of the night after the funeral?”

Their father, William, was a common pleas judge and also served in the Pa. House of Representatives during the CIvil War. He was the son of the county’s first representative in the State House, per Schenck’s History of Warren County.

William and his wife provided a statement in the wake of their daughter’s death.

“The kindness shown to us and our daughters during their last sickness and the manifestations of sympathy have been so general that individual acknowledgment is impossible. We take this way to express our heartfelt thanks to all who sought in any way to alleviate our sorrow, and especially do we thank those Christian ladies who so tenderly watched by our sick during weary days and nights.

“We thank all who by their kindly offices assisted in any way in the burial services of our dead, and especially do we think those who, unknown to us, lined the graves of our children with evergreens and flowers. Our earnest prayer to God is that those kind friends may never feel the bitterness of the sorrow that is ours and their homes may never witness the desolation that reigns in our household.”

The papers published a series of tributes made by organizations that Mary had been a part of – the Entre Nous Society, the Pennsylvania Female College (now Chatham University) where she attended.

The Ledger sensed a “gloom over our whole community” in response to the death of these young ladies.

I don’t often wax philosophical in my stories but the Ledger writer did.

“There are lives so dark and pleasureless that death comes to end them like an angel of light, bringing rest and sweet relief,” But when death comes to the young and happy – whose lives have been all sunshine, and cuts them down in their bloom and promise, we feel that the course of nature has been departed from, and wonder at the mysterious ways of providence.

“Why, out of all the children that flock every morning to school, should Hattie be taken – she who can least be spared? Active, intelligent and sunshiny, none more full of promise, none more universally beloved, none whose death would be more bitterly lamented. Young as she was, the foundations of a noble and beautiful character were already laid, and she had already begun to be useful to the world.

Of Mary they simply wrote – “We cannot imagine one to whom death seemed further away.”

Maybe the writer was trying to provide some solace to the community? Provide some lens by which the loss might be processed?

“It is hard to understand such deaths as these,” they acknowledge. “Hard to conceive how human nature can support such a terrible double-blow. It is well for the stricken father and more than human suffering has a limit. There is a weight of grief to which nothing can be added. The cup can be filled to the brim can but overflow.

“There is some comfort, too, in the remembrance of lives wholly beautiful – lives that are ended but not lost. A wounded heart is more tolerable than one parched and dried with starvation. The depths of affliction are better – infinitely better, than the dry desert of despair which the waters of affection have never moistened.”