Julius Caesar had been warned about the month of March. A seer reportedly had alerted the famous Roman dictator of his impending doom with the famous line, “Beware the Ides (middle) of March.”

History tells us that Caesar failed to heed that warning and in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman Senate.

That event came to mind recently as I walked a small burial ground in the Flanders section of East Lyme, examining some of the tombstone dates. The Pestilence Yard Cemetery has only a dozen or so permanent residents, but it seemed like the month of March appeared more times than expected as the month of their demise. Just coincidence?

I remembered back to when Rod McCauley and I first became involved with a tombstone from that cemetery. Calvin Spencer’s headstone had fallen into disrepair and had long been buried under the cemetery grass. We found it while using a metal probing rod, hauling it out in pieces and taking it to a warm basement for repair.

Readers may remember the difficulty we had lifting the restored 300-pound monument back up the stairs and out into a waiting truck to return it to the graveyard.

Local blacksmith Calvin Spencer had contracted an infectious disease during the month of March and had died on March 31, 1813. I had no trouble remembering that date as we had to supply some of that missing inscription during the restoration.

The same day we held the reinterment ceremony with the many volunteers who helped with that project, another cemetery resident caught our eye. A much smaller tombstone (also brownstone) lay in pieces close to the chained outer border of the burial ground. This stone had been intended to honor the memory of the 8-month-old daughter of Dr. James and Hephfebah Lee, who had succumbed to the dreaded disease of smallpox.

Little Harriot Lee died on March 14, 1795.

What a tragedy. She was so young. How must her poor parents have felt?

Looking at the stone, we both agreed we couldn’t just leave little Harriot in her present condition. Despite the amount of work that we knew lay ahead, Mr. McCauley and I both felt she deserved better. We gathered up what remained of the headstone and brought it back to the workshop.

Over the next month or so, we worked on the highly compromised stone marker, but this one actually turned out to be an easier repair than the first one despite being in more pieces.

Unfortunately, much of the inscription had gone missing. Using those same procedures we had used with Calvin Spencer, Harriot Lee’s gravestone was reassembled and her name reinscribed in the tinted mortar. The return trip to the pest yard this time required just two people. This little girl’s memory would now be preserved.

Harriot’s tombstone specifically listed the cause of death as “the smallpox” while Calvin Spencer’s had made no mention of how he died. However, because Spencer’s medical records have surfaced, we now know that he died of something called “spotted fever,” a type of highly virulent meningitis.

Both had been victims of epidemics but 18 years apart. Also, both had died during the month of March.

Now there does seem to be a connection between seasonal periods and the spread of infectious diseases among the human population. Pathogens are known to love crowded environments. Studies show that winter depresses our immune systems, but humans generally spend more time indoors in relative isolation during that time and therefore (unless one were to go to a well-attended, poorly ventilated gathering which has the power to become a “super spreader”) infections would generally be low.

But early spring appears to be problematic. That has traditionally been the time when we emerge from our winter dens, bringing our depressed immune systems and low Vitamin D levels (due to limited exposure to sunlight) along with us. It is interesting here to note that the link connecting low vitamin D levels with disease has been studied by the medical community for well over a century.

Humans again became socially active at this time as farming communities would begin to plant and people in general would begin to socially reengage. Maybe it’s no wonder then that so many tombstones record March death dates. Perhaps “March Madness” for pathogens makes a little more sense in this light.

These epidemics were horrible and outside of relative isolation were difficult to avoid. Eyewitness, Dr. Vine Utley, describes Calvin Spencer’s symptoms as “confusion, violent shaking, irritability, no appetite and brown scurf on his tongue.” The doctor concluded his patient died of the currently prevailing epidemic “vulgarly referred to as spotted fever.”

That epidemic was reported to have begun along the Connecticut River in the 1st Society of Lyme (Old Lyme) and spread to Hamburg and Lyme and then to East Lyme (2nd Parish) and eventually, Waterford. Many local people (perhaps as many as one in 40) died. Dr. Utley noted in his journal more than a few were his patients.

In Vermont that same epidemic would later kill over 6,000 state residents. The virus could be viral, fungal or bacterial in nature and had many of the symptoms of today’s cerebrospinal meningitis.

Inflammation of the brain and spinal cord produced such symptoms as stiff neck, high fever, rash, headache, vomiting, confusion, irritability and eventually violent seizures, coma and death. Dr. Utley recorded in his medical journal that Calvin Spencer died in just such a manner.

Little Harriot Lee would also die a horrible death from a prevailing epidemic but not quite in the same way. Smallpox was labeled “The King of Terrors” due to its highly contagious and deadly nature. It had an incubation period of 7-17 days. Flu-like symptoms would begin to appear after about three days, accompanied by severe head and back ache along with the tell-tale rash.

That rash would develop into lesions which would soon give way to oozing pustules and finally develop into hard blisters all over the body. Even the throat and tongue were often not spared.

The terrible smell added to the horror of it all. Smallpox traditionally took the lives of 30% of those it infected. Harriot Lee was one of the 30% who would not survive her encounter with the disease. She died in 1795 on what must have been for the Lee family a very sad March day.

Now it should be said that there was an inoculation procedure available at the time that would help guard against the disease. In 1777 General George Washington had employed it successfully during the American Revolution when he mandated that his soldiers be inoculated for smallpox.

The procedure was risky and not without controversy as it involved the scratching of live smallpox pustules into healthy skin. The process was called “variolation” and basically would give a healthy individual smallpox but hopefully just enough to create an immunity.

About 1% of the soldiers inoculated died.

Luckily, help was on the way. British doctor Edward Jenner discovered that English milkmaids seemed to be immune to smallpox after contracting the common and less serious cowpox. Sensing a connection, Jenner was able to develop a cowpox vaccine which proved highly effective against smallpox without the previous risks. Smallpox was well on its way to being eradicated.

The Centers for Disease Control notes that due to this vaccine, smallpox was eventually eliminated in North America by 1952, Europe by 1953, South America by 1971, Asia by 1975 and Africa by 1977.

In 1980, the World Health Organization finally declared the world free from the scourge of smallpox. Quite a story and considered by many to be one of the great achievements of mankind.

I guess that is why I was so surprised when recently stumbling across a 1903 article that had been cut from an old East Lyme newspaper. Headlined “East Lyme Citizens Raise Pool to Fight Compulsory Vaccination,” the article reported that $500 had been raised by a group of townspeople to hire a lawyer “for the express purpose of making a test of the rights of the school committee of the town to keep their children from school because they are not vaccinated.”

The article went on to say … “the residents of the town are mad through and through because they are asked to vaccinate their children and there has not been a single smallpox case in the town. One resident said last night ‘if a man is afraid of smallpox, let him get vaccinated to protect himself. If I don’t believe in vaccination and do not fear smallpox, then it is my own lookout.’”

Unvaccinated students attending Flanders and Niantic schools had been routinely sent home if their parents refused to comply with that policy.

Looking through the early records, no follow-up to this article could be located so we are left in the dark as to how this all turned out. I do believe it is safe to say that no outbreak of smallpox occurred in East Lyme in 1903 as that would have been big news and not difficult to find.

But was that positive outcome due to luck? Or perhaps because of the eventual compliance of the protesting parents? Or was it because the majority of townspeople had already dutifully observed the vaccine mandate?

In any case, I’ll wager dollars to donuts that very few if anyone from either side paid much, if any, attention to the specific date of that contentious meeting. Looking again at the article in question, someone had scribbled the date March 3, 1903, on it. Why, those pesky Ides of March were just peeking around the corner, weren’t they?

Jim Littlefield is a retired history teacher in East Lyme who has written two local history books and two historical novels. His columns can also be found in the Post Road Review.