The Smallpox Mayor of Old Tacoma
When an outbreak of smallpox threatened the young town of New Tacoma in 1881, its first mayor took drastic, solitary action to save the community.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
David Lister, an early resident of Tacoma, shared memories of the town's rugged infancy yesterday. Recalling his time as mayor in 1881, Lister recounted a harrowing experience with a smallpox outbreak. 'We had thirty-two cases of the disease and three or four deaths before we knew what it was,' Lister said. Dr. Wing, one of the few physicians in town, was the only one who recognized the smallpox. Realizing the danger, Lister traveled to Seattle to consult Dr. Smith. Lister recalled, 'I put him in a rig, telling him that if it was smallpox they would all sue me for other purposes. In the evening he told me it was smallpox. He advised me to enter a general quarantine. I did so. I kept my room, the doctors were the only ones who came to see me, and no others were allowed to see me. We eventually controlled it. The epidemic lasted about four months.'
“It was probably the most desolate looking place on earth when I arrived here. The first year it rained with only fourteen bright days to that year.”
Lister's 1881 crisis—where a singular civic leader had to navigate public panic and medical uncertainty—prefigures the modern challenges of coordinating health responses in a growing urban center. The tension between public safety and the economic life of a city remains as potent in today's Seattle as it was in the frontier days of Tacoma.
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