The 1918 flu pandemic in Palo Alto

The influenza pandemic of 1918 arrived on the Peninsula at a strange moment. Palo Alto was a small college town with a giant Army camp across the creek. Stanford's men had largely traded classes for military drill. Then, in the last weeks of World War I, a respiratory illness began filling the camp hospital and the campus infirmary at the same time. Within two months it had killed 147 soldiers at Camp Fremont and 14 people connected to Stanford.

This page sets out what the records show. Most of what is published comes from Stanford's archives, letters written at the camp and the work of historian Barbara Wilcox. Much less is known about the town itself. We say where the record runs thin. For the camp's full story, see our page on Camp Fremont.

How the flu arrived

The disease first caught military doctors' attention at an Army base in Kansas in the spring of 1918. A second and deadlier wave spread in the fall. By late September influenza was present along the whole West Coast, according to a federal history of the pandemic in California. Reported cases in the state passed 115,000 by early November and the true number was probably higher.

The Peninsula was primed for it. Camp Fremont, in today's Menlo Park, held around 27,000 to 28,000 soldiers at its peak. Stanford was home to a Students' Army Training Corps unit, which put its men in barracks routines with reveille at 6 a.m. and taps at 10 p.m. Crowded quarters and constant contact helped the virus move fast.

Camp Fremont

The Almanac, drawing on Wilcox's research, dates the camp's first case to September 28, 1918. Letters written by a medical worker named Perlie M. Phinney fill in the next weeks. On October 3 he knew of no influenza cases in camp. By October 8 the whole camp was under quarantine, with no one allowed in or out and soldiers barred from Menlo Park.

Measures inside the camp were simple. Each unit stayed in its own quarters. Tents were taken down each day, blankets were aired in the sun and tent flaps were left open at night. Masks were issued at least once a week. Patients got alcohol rubs and fever tablets. Phinney wrote that some men died within 24 hours of falling ill.

Counts of the sick differ by source:

Accounts also differ on when the quarantine ended. The Almanac says it ended on October 18, when some units were ordered to move out and sick men traveled east in rail cars. Phinney's letters describe a quarantine lifted at 5 p.m. on November 9 after about six weeks. Both may be right for different units.

Stanford's worst weeks

Stanford Magazine's account, based on the Stanford Daily and student letters, gives a clear timeline:

1. October 9, 1918: The Daily's first report says more than 100 students are under doctors' care.
2. October 16: The Daily reports the second student death.
3. October 21: Four more student deaths are announced.
4. October 24: A university mask requirement takes effect.
5. Early November: Officials believe the worst has passed and lift the mask rule.
6. November 11: The armistice sets off celebrations.
7. January 5, 1919: Henry Lewin Cannon, 47, an associate professor of English history, becomes the last recorded death.

President Ray Lyman Wilbur had been the campus physician during a 1903 typhoid outbreak that killed nine students and he moved quickly. Every student had a temperature check each night and anyone above 99.3 degrees was isolated. Fraternity houses became infirmaries and students volunteered as nurses. Social gatherings were banned and women's curfews were tightened. The Daily ran health tips such as avoiding handshakes and crowded cars.

The toll on campus

Stanford had about 1,322 undergraduates that fall. Near the peak, student Hope Snedden wrote that 109 Training Corps men were in the hospital and that Stanford had lost "one girl & eight men." The Stanford Illustrated Review listed 10 dead undergraduates in November. The president's report the next year counted 12 student deaths, 10 men and two women. With Professor Cannon and Charlie Meyers, the campus barber, the total reached 14.

Behind the numbers were families. Junior Lorenz Hansen died of pneumonia after influenza and his only sister died a week later. His fraternity brother Charles Sullivan was carried on a stretcher from Encina Hall and spent two nights packed in ice. He survived and recovered at Camp Fremont. Our Stanford history page covers the university in the war years.

What we know about the town

Here the record gets thin. Stanford Magazine mentions quarantines between the campus and Palo Alto and notes in passing that Palo Alto barbershops were still open. We could not find a published account of specific orders by Palo Alto's town government, such as school closures or a mask ordinance. Other California cities did act. Los Angeles closed schools, churches and theaters in mid-October and San Francisco officials called on everyone to wear masks in public, with the Red Cross handing out more than 100,000 masks in four days.

A few local events are documented. Phinney wrote of parades in Palo Alto on November 10 and 11 to celebrate the armistice. On December 24, 1918, Palo Alto High School's students and staff marched from their old building to the new campus at Embarcadero Road and El Camino Real, as our Paly page describes. The Julia Morgan Hostess House served Camp Fremont until October 1918, during the outbreak, before its move to Palo Alto the next year.

After the epidemic

Illness continued at lower levels into the new year. Big Game football returned at Thanksgiving 1918. Across California influenza stayed common through the winter and spring of 1919. Sacramento residents were still wearing masks in February. By summer the disease had largely disappeared from the state. Nationwide about 675,000 Americans died and the worldwide toll likely passed 50 million. San Francisco alone lost about 3,000 people.

The camp did not last much longer. Salvage was ordered in December 1918 and the Army closed Camp Fremont in 1919. Its hospital on Willow Road reopened in April 1919 as a Public Health Service tuberculosis hospital and the site is now a Veterans Affairs campus.

Remembering 1918

For most of the next century the pandemic was a footnote in local history, overshadowed by the war. Interest returned in 2020, when Stanford Magazine and other outlets revisited the 1918 outbreak during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no memorial to the flu's victims in Palo Alto or at Stanford that we could find. Fremont Park in Menlo Park, with its 1923 camp plaque, is the closest place to reflect on the soldiers. For the history of medicine on campus, see our page on Stanford Medicine. For dates in context, use our Palo Alto timeline.

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