Now that the teenage granddaughter could drive, she and Louise Craine would spend hours on the road re-tracing their ancestors’ steps. It was on one such trip, as the twosome rounded the curve along a dirt road leading from Old Cumslo Road, the grandmother began her story. “Now, sugar, I don’t exactly know when this happened, but I do know that my mother, Lena Victoria, was already married to Webb Vincent. They lived right over yonder,” she said pointing across the kudzu field.
As the car stopped, she continued. “You see, there was a disease called pellagra that was mighty common in the South after the Civil War. Everybody now knows that it is caused by a vitamin deficiency so it belongs in the same category as beriberi and scurvy. That was not always the case, however. When your great-grandmother got it, the thinking was that pellagra was contagious.”
With sadness in her eyes, Louise Craine continued, “During the Civil War, there were 10,000 deaths from pellagra in one brief period down in Andersonville Prison. After the war, everybody was getting it. By the early 1900s, pellagra was an epidemic in the South. There were 1,306 reported pellagra deaths in South Carolina during the first ten months of 1915; 100,000 Southerners were affected in 1916. At some point, my mother became one of them.”
“She broke out in these patches all over her arms, just wouldn’t quit scratching, and was in so much pain. She acted almost crazy from her discomfort. That coupled with the idea that pellagra was infectious, prompted her to be put in the Georgia State Sanitarium. That’s the old name for Central State Hospital in Milledgeville.”
“Oh, my goodness!” the teenager gasped. That hospital was a place for pellagra patients? What happened to her, Grandma? How long did she have to stay?”
“Well, that’s the thing of it. I think there must have been a lot of pellagra patients there. It was one of the places where some experiments were conducted later by a Dr. Joseph Goldberger. He eventually proved that pellagra was not contagious, and was even able to help sufferers just by changing their diets.”
“When my mama was there, there was no treatment except isolation from everyone who didn‘t have the disease. She began to feel helpless and hopeless. Fortunately, she never gave up, and decided to escape. That night and over the next couple of days, she walked over 25 miles to get home.”
“She used to talk about how frightened she’d been that first night when she escaped into the moonlight. Since she had no choice but to follow the roads, she walked at night and rested in the woods during the day. By the second night, she realized that no one from the sanitarium was going to pursue her. The ratio of patients to doctors was so high that apparently Lena Vincent was the least of the doctors’ worries.”
“When she finally arrived home, Mama was so itchy and uncomfortable that she jumped into the well! One of the farm hands heard her screaming and ran to get my daddy. The two of them managed to pull her up with the bucket and the ropes. Eventually, she recovered. One can surmise it was from a change in diet.”
The granddaughter sat there staring at the dilapidated old well, trying to imagine the whole set of circumstances. “It’s amazing that your mama could walk such a long way home!”
Louise Craine smiled encouragingly, “Well, sugar, it’s just a testament to the fact that the human spirit is capable of great feats when it needs to be.”
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