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In the late 19th century, American cities moved to a soundtrack of clopping and clanking. Horses pulled commuters on streetcars, hauled construction materials for new buildings, carted groceries to homes, and conveyed patrons to theaters and baseball games.

But in late September 1872, horses fell sick on several farms near Toronto. Within days, a veterinarian found an additional 14 sick horses in the city. Within a week, the count grew to 600. The mysterious “Canadian horse disease” spread quickly, following rail lines into bustling cities and knocking out the workhorses that had powered the United States into a new era.

A fire devastated Boston’s commercial district, in part because horses were too sick to haul pump wagons. In New York, boxes lay untouched at railroad depots and city piers, among the busiest in the world. People lost work. Garbage went uncollected, mail undelivered. Political rallies, just weeks ahead of the presidential election, were canceled. Streets fell silent in such far-flung cities as Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco. In D.C., <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/why-the-long-face-because-in-1872-nearly-every-horse-in-washington-got-very-ill/2016/11/05/cdd73124-a1e9-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html" target="_blank">streetcar service was shut down</a>, as was horse- and mule-drawn traffic on the C&amp;O Canal.

Known as the Great Epizootic, the outbreak of what was later determined to be the equine flu hit the vast majority of the country’s horses between October 1872 and March 1873, temporarily paralyzing cities in a crisis “comparable to what would happen today if gas pumps ran dry or the electric grid went down,” University of Tennessee historian Ernest Freeberg <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-flu-virus-shut-down-the-us-economy-in-1872-by-infecting-horses-150052?xid=PS_smithsonian" target="_blank">wrote</a>.

Fortunately, the crisis was short-lived. Most horses rallied, and life in each locale resumed within several weeks. But the 150-year-old episode serves as an early example of how vulnerable modern life can be to a disease outbreak among animals. It’s a strikingly familiar theme at a time when an outbreak of avian flu has helped send <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/01/10/egg-prices-avian-flu-inflation/" target=_blank>egg prices soaring</a> (and has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/07/bird-flu-outbreak-faq/" target=_blank>infected some mammals</a>) — and when a virus believed to have started in animals in a Chinese open-air market jumped into humans and shut down much of the globe starting in 2020.

Though the 19th century was marked by the advent of steam power, only horses were nimble enough to move within fast-expanding cities. Horses were the “invisible labor force” behind everything from international shipping to local entertainment, Oliver Lazarus, a Harvard doctoral candidate in the history of science, wrote for the <a href="https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/the-great-epizootic-of-1872" target=_blank>Gotham Center for New York City History</a>.

Cities were teeming with horse power: New York had 70,000 horses and Philadelphia about 50,000. “A banker in 19th-century Philadelphia would have encountered more horses than a cowboy in Montana,” historian <a href="https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/horses/" target=_blank>Ann Norton Greene </a>wrote.

Working horses were geldings, which typically lasted less than five years on the taxing jobs, said Sean Kheraj, a professor of Canadian and environmental history at Toronto Metropolitan University. Often, he said, they died on city streets or were sent to factories, where they were processed for such products as glue, leather and brooms.

So horses were constantly being bought and sold to replenish the workforce. And the booming rail lines transported horses from the countryside to cities, where they were kept in cramped and poorly ventilated stables — the perfect conditions for outbreaks.

The disease moved fastest among the Northeastern urban centers closely connected by rail. The outbreak slowed as it spread west, where cities were connected by fewer rail lines, and as wintry conditions halted train travel. Newspaper reports, for instance, showed the epizootic (the general term for a disease in animals) reached Utah in January 1873. But reports of the flu vanished from the headlines until it reached Sacramento in March, suggesting that weather-related constraints on the rail lines “momentarily halted” the illness, Kheraj <a href="https://www.seankheraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/envhis_emy010.pdf" target=_blank>wrote</a> in the journal Environmental History in 2018.

The Great Epizootic “was a case study of the early effects of urbanization,” Kheraj said in an interview. “The railways had taken these different disease pools and put them together.”

But that wasn’t so apparent at the time. There was no system for isolating sick animals, which started out with light coughs but would soon develop fevers, refuse food and struggle to move. Still-contagious horses were returned to work too quickly, infecting healthy animals. The germ theory of disease remained controversial, and one prevailing idea at the time was that peculiar “atmospheric conditions” had led to the outbreak.

Only after the outbreak had ended did professionals begin laying the groundwork for a new understanding of how animal disease is spread. An 1873 report for the American Public Health Association, for instance, found “abundant and convincing proof that it spreads from city to city, and from country to country, by virtue of its communicability, and regardless of atmospheric conditions.”

The outbreak also marked a brief reminder of the cruelty that lay at the heart of city life. Though many of the sick horses could barely stand, let alone work, desperate workers and companies tried nonetheless to push them into service.

In New York, for instance, horse-drawn streetcar companies were losing more than $2,000 a day (around $50,000 in today’s dollars) due to the loss of animal labor. “The poor sick brutes, that are eyesores in the streets, are harnessed up and driven their daily journey,” the New York Daily Herald reported. Henry Bergh, president and founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, began patrolling the streets to remove sick horses from work, pitting his group against the streetcar companies.

But animal cruelty concerns dissipated as the disease ran its course. In fact, Lazarus said, the reliance on horses grew, with the number of working horses peaking nearly 30 years later, in 1900. (Oxen and men, both of whom were drafted into hauling service during the outbreak, proved weak replacements.)

Neither a new awareness of society’s vulnerable dependence on horses nor concerns about the animals’ treatment changed how cities operated. Only new technology did: streetcar electrification by the early 1900s and, in the 1920s, the use of motor vehicles, particularly trucks that could haul and deliver throughout cities.

Historians say the episode did have some impact on a move to professionalize veterinary medicine. But in the end, little else changed in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak.

Kheraj noted that the epizootic lasted a few weeks in one city before moving to the next. “By the time it was in San Francisco, they had moved on in New York,” he noted. Much like the 1918 flu, the outbreak largely faded from memory once it passed (even if that flu <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/06/1918-flu-fourth-wave/" target=_blank>took years to pass</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/09/01/1918-flu-pandemic-end/" target=_blank>never fully ended</a>).

And that, too, is a familiar theme three years after covid-19 emerged. Lazarus said he thought about the aftermath of the Great Epizootic in recent years when people spoke of a desire to return to their pre-covid lives.

In both the epizootic of 150 years ago and the pandemic today, he said, “you see how quickly people want things to return to normal.”

<i>Jodie Tillman is a freelance writer based in College Park.</i>

Jodie Tillman

washpost

Horse flu crippled U.S. cities 150 years ago with fires, job losses

the-washington-post

An equine flu decimated domestic horses 