When will this end? Beaufort County has experience with economic turmoil and pandemics

Nostalgia is suddenly in.

As social distancing and self-quarantine measures keep us cooped, people around the globe are turning to all kinds of ways to stay entertained.

Some of these ways include looking through old photo albums or finding old home videos or even plugging up old gaming systems that still work. Even our sports channels are re-running old Super Bowls and that 1993 Wimbledon championship match you might have missed.

The great thing about studying our past is that it informs our present, and it might help Beaufortonians to know that nothing we’re going through now is necessarily new, even if none of us alive remember it.

The Spanish flu pandemic — yes, the one that hit 102 years ago — definitely touched Beaufort in ways familiar to some of us going through the pains of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

It was not until the later months of fall in 1918 that the deadly flu spread through Beaufort, but by October Parris Island was quarantined.

That same month, three handfuls of students in Beaufort contracted the virus and schools across the county shut down, much like they are now.

College-aged students also suddenly found themselves headed back to their hometowns as Clemson, USC and The Citadel stopped their classes as well. Some buildings at USC even had to be used as makeshift hospitals when the number of patients overwhelmed Columbia.

Public gatherings then, as now, were largely shut down as well, especially in national “hotspots” like Philadelphia and St. Louis.

While the flu touched over 50,000 South Carolinians throughout that fateful year, there were at least two other major events going on worldwide, in case you needed a quick refresher.

The boll weevil’s destruction of local cotton fields was wreaking havoc on the local economy. As a USDA report from that year succinctly stated, “Almost the entire sea island cotton belt is infested.”

“Over There”

Meanwhile, over in France, an armistice was being prepared for the Allied Forces and Germany to put a formal end to the event we call World War I.

As hard as things seem to be now, can you imagine being a student sent home from school to avoid a virus that would claim the lives of over 14,000 people statewide — while simultaneously wondering about a world just finishing the “war to end all wars?”

Can you imagine hearing your parents arguing over candlelight about the death of the agrarian society in the southern United States, even if you don’t understand all that would entail?

You’d have all that to deal with while literally playing kick-the-can to entertain yourself because there’s no one at Monkey’s Uncle to deliver toys to you during the quarantine, and certainly no distance-learning options.

What if you’re an adult who’s been asked to stay home in 1918? Your children only have a can to kick around outside, your spouse is around you 24/7, and even if you want to get out and drive to let loose some pent-up energy, that whopping 17 miles an hour with the foot on the floor just doesn’t cut it.

There were not even any modern medicines then to alleviate the suffering of those who came down with the flu. Vaccines, antivirals and antibiotics were still another 20 to 30 years away. If you were lucky, you got your hands on some moonshine from a still somewhere deep in the Hilton Head Island woods.

What is easy to see now with hindsight was that good times were once again just around the corner.

What’s next?

Human beings, especially in Beaufort, are adaptable and innovative. The next few years worldwide saw a boom in housing development and increase in production of cars, movies, telephones and radios that played burgeoning jazz music.

Locally, we moved from cotton being king to being known — albeit briefly — as “The Lettuce City.” Truck farming became popular as a suitably diversified replacement for cotton crops.

With many reasons for our community to be weakened in 1918, our ancestors emerged stronger than before when the flu, the war and the boll weevil finally passed. Even as we bide our time mostly indoors, we can remember that when it’s safe to open the door again, we can step out confidently.

After all, we’ve done it here before.