WABASH WAS ONE OF MANY COLLEGES to have a Student Army Training Corps (SATC) program during WWI. The number of men in college in America had plummeted, raising the fear of a shortage of men to serve as leaders during the war and after. The SATC was created as a way for young men to serve while getting their education.
The program proved quite popular and 525 men came to Wabash to join it.
Yet during the war years an even greater threat arose. The 1918 worldwide flu pandemic killed three times as many people as WWI.
The first case at Wabash arrived just one week after the SATC swearing-in ceremony, as described in Wabash College: The First Hundred Years:
“The two companies had scarcely lined up when two men pitched forward suddenly to the floor. They were being carried out when another man in the ranks fainted. The man next to him bent to pick him up, and he too fainted. Before roll call had been completed 10 men had fainted in the sight of the badly demoralized corps… an announcement was made in the afternoon of the suspension of all classroom work for an indefinite time.”
All of the sick students were taken to the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house, which was being turned into a camp hospital.
Again, from The First Hundred Years: “That night there were 35 men in the hospital. By October 12 there were 95 men crowding every room and nearly every hallway of the transformed Phi Delt house, seven of them with serious cases of pneumonia.
“In all, 120 cases were received by the hospital during the run of the epidemic, and not a single boy lost his life.”
THAT REMARKABLE STATISTIC was thanks to a great extent to the care provided by the women of the town, “an outpouring of energy nothing short of heroic,” as described in The First Hundred Years:
“Miss Mary Jolley, of Crawfordsville, head nurse, remained steadily at her post in spite of the fact that she herself was attacked by influenza. Volunteers stepped forward to help her. Three of these volunteers were trained nurses—Miss May Huston, Miss Edith Hunt, and Miss Ethel Newell. There was one tragedy…the third of the trained nurses to volunteer, Miss Ethel Newell, had offered her services in spite of the fact that she was convalescing from a very recent attack of pneumonia. She knew the risk was great, and took it. Pneumonia returned, and she died at the home of her parents…”
By October 24, 1918, the outbreak had run its course and all classes and activities resumed. Less than a month later the war ended and the barracks were demolished and sold for scrap. By the end of the year Wabash returned to normal.
Ethel Newell is forgotten today, but her sacrifice and the sacrifices of the other members of the Crawfordsville community to help Wabash through that troubled time can serve to remind us that often the worst of times can bring out the best in people.
—BETH SWIFT,
Archivist