Yellow Fever and Florida’s Founding

Dr. Steve Noll, a Master Lecturer in History at the University of Florida, explains some of Florida’s previous encounters with epidemics.

While the story of the yellow fever epidemics in Tampa in 1887 and Jacksonville in 1888 is rather well known and documented (see below), the role of the disease known as “yellow jack” in the demise of what was Florida’s largest city in the 1830s has been almost forgotten.

By the late 1830s, St. Joseph, located in the Florida Panhandle on a good natural harbor on St. Josephs Bay, had a population of close to 4,000 people.  It was the site of the 1838 Florida Constitutional Convention, where 55 delegates from around the territory of Florida ratified the document that would be the frame of government for Florida from when it became a state in 1845 to when it seceded from the Union in 1861.  In 1841, a ship docking in the harbor brought a person infected with yellow fever to St. Joseph.  By the end of the year, the town’s population dropped to less than 400, as many people died or fled the town.  In July 1841, Territorial Governor Robert Reid died of yellow fever he contracted in St. Joseph.  His daughter and granddaughter also died in the epidemic.