The Consumption Journey

Plaza Hotel in 1931, when it opened to the public

Jesse McCray was a druggist in Dallas who lived at the Hotel Plaza at the end of his life. It was located on Commerce and Jefferson Streets (Now South Record Street) Caddy Corner to the Old Red Courthouse. The area has been

radically altered since then and the Dallas County Court now stands at this location facing the John F. Kennedy Memorial and John Neely Bryan’s cabin in Founder’s Square. Record Street was closed to create the Dallas County Court Building. The only remaining landmarks are Union Station and Old Red along with the familiar layout of Dealey Plaza the site of President Kennedy’s assassination.

Dealey Plaza

Union Station

Old Red Courthouse

Dallas Couty Court

Plaza Hotel 1931

John Neely Bryan Cabin

William Aaron Miller owned a Pool Hall. The exact name and location of which is unknown. Both he and Jesse were born at the dawn of the 20^th Century. They likely never met or even crossed paths, until after their deaths, but their lives both took similar turns that proved to be fatal and they would meet in their afterlife.

Jesse started life on July 1, 1900 born to Robert & Mattie (Scott) McCray. After an initial failure at Marriage he seemed to be back on track with his new life and wife. Yet, by the end he wasn’t residing with his wife. He died at Woodlawn Hospital. But his death certificate claims his usual residence as the Plaza Hotel [Should be Hotel Plaza]. The reasons for this aren’t clear and bring up a number of questions that the documents simply cannot answer.

William came into this world a mere 458 days after Jesse. William seems to have left no clear paper trail of his existence. His death certificate is one of the only documents available to tell us about his life. It lists 2407 Cole Drive as his address, but the address does not seem to exist. He is apparently married to Hazel Miller, who completed the information on the Death Certificate. But Hazel was unable to produce the names of his parents at the time of death, so we have little info to corroborate the information.

Their different paths end here with the number one Infectious disease of all time.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that generally affects the lungs. The classic symptoms of active TB are a chronic cough with blood-containing sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. The historical term “consumption” came about due to the weight loss. Hollywood has taught us well that the mere image of someone coughing up blood is a sure sign that they will be dead in the next few minutes of screen time. In reality, it took anywhere from 1-5 years to run its course.

On 1 Dec 1934, Jesse contracted Pulmonary Tuberculosis. He was subsequently hospitalized at Woodlawn Hospital where on 13 July he underwent surgery to remove his Appendix. He apparently was already too weak to sustain himself and 2 weeks after this surgery he passed from this earth on 27 July 1935. Being a druggist, he was likely used to dispensing drug to render aid to the ill. But there were no drugs available to stem this terrible disease that had proceeded unchecked for millennia. Jesse’s attending Physician at the time of his death was a man by the name of Dr. Roy Goggans.

In 1938, William also contracted Pulmonary Tuberculosis. Four years later he gave his final breath under the same watchful eye of Dr. Goggans. He was taken to the same ward and hospital and perhaps slept in the same bed once occupied by Jesse.

Dr. Goggans served as Woodlawn’s director for many years and was a tireless advocate for the cause, regularly engaging the public with discussions about the needs of the hospital and patients. In addition to treating TB patients, Woodlawn’s mission was to care for all Infectious Diseases, while Parkland treated everything else but infectious diseases. At the time of Jesse & William’s convalescence the facility was located on Maple street approximately 3 miles from the Dallas City Limit of the day (exact address is unknown to me).

Dr. Roy Goggans

Dr. Goggans served as Woodlawn’s director for many years and was a tireless advocate for the cause, regularly engaging the public with discussions about the needs of the hospital and patients. In addition to treating TB patients, Woodlawn’s mission was to care for all Infectious Diseases, while Parkland treated everything else but infectious diseases. At the time of Jesse & William’s convalescence the facility was located on Maple street approximately 3 miles from the Dallas City Limit of the day (exact address unknown to me).

Woodlawn Hospital Circa 1930s

Parkland Hospital relocated to a new facility in 1954 at 5201 Harry Hines Boulevard and turned over the “Old” Parkland building located at Maple & Oak Lawn to Woodlawn. Known to most Dallas residents as the “Old” Parkland, the main building was constructed in 1913 would now become Woodlawn Tubercular Hospital for the next 30 years, finally closing in 1974. It would

Postcard of “Old” Parkland Hospital that later became Woodlawn Tubercular Hospital in 1954

then become a prison before lying vacant for decades with masses of broken windows and Asbestos. The building was finally rescued by Crow Holdings, who remade it into their new Headquarters. They did a spectacular job of restoring the building and have made the once vacant intersection into a thriving area of commerce.

Woodlawn quickly outgrew this space as well and was a step-child to the main hospital of Parkland and was chronically underfunded, understaffed and in disrepair. One news article claims that they were turning patients away because they lacked enough sheets to change the beds once a week. Part of the issue seems to have related to the way the hospital was funded being split by the City and the County. Often one side would have money but the other didn’t and this derailed more than its fair share of plans.

Of all the attempts that were made to improve the conditions, nothing seems to have kept for very long. News articles abound about the miserable conditions throughout its lifetime.

A brief history of Tuberculosis:

Although Tuberculosis (TB) existed for centuries, The bacillus causing tuberculosis, M. tuberculosis, was only identified and described on 24 March 1882 by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1905 for this discovery. However, Koch overlooked the threat that Bovine Tuberculosis played and spent many a year discrediting those that thought otherwise. The article to the left is one such example where he attempts to discredit the program to destroy cattle with Bovine Tuberculosis.

Medical Science still had a number of new discoveries to make before they could contain this awful disease and several of them related to something right inside your refrigerator that came to your front door, often on a daily basis.

Milk is an excellent medium for microbial growth, and when it is stored at ambient temperature bacteria and other pathogens soon proliferate. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says improperly handled raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne disease source, making it one of the world’s most dangerous food products. Koch’s belief that Bovine Tuberculosis was unrelated to the human strain kept scientists off track in coming to a clear understands . He had not realized that humans were contracting TB from infected cows.

In 1892, chemist Earnest Lederle experimentally inoculated milk from tuberculosis-diseased cows into Guinea pigs, which caused them to develop the disease. In 1910, Lederle, then in the role of Commissioner of Health, introduced mandatory pasteurization of milk in New York city.

Another piece of the puzzle was solved through Pasteurization, which is a process that treats liquids with mild heat (<100 °C) to eliminate pathogens and extend shelf-life. The process is intended to reduce spoilage organisms and eliminate vegetative bacteria but not bacterial spores. This process was named after the French scientist Louis Pasteur, whose research in the 1880s demonstrated that thermal processing would inactivate unwanted microorganisms in wine. Spoilage enzymes are also inactivated during pasteurization. It was many years later before this process became common in Milk. Koch insisted that Pasteurization was a waste of time.

Diseases prevented by pasteurization can include Tuberculosis, Brucellosis, Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever, and Q-Fever; it also kills the harmful bacteria Salmonella, Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli O157:H7 (aka E. coli), among others.

Prior to industrialization, dairy cows were kept in urban areas to limit the time between milk production and consumption hence the risk of disease transmission via raw milk was reduced. As urban densities increased, and supply chains lengthened to the distance from country to city, raw milk (often days old) became recognized as a source of disease. But because tuberculosis has a long incubation period in humans, it was difficult to link unpasteurized milk consumption as the cause to the effect of disease.

Tuberculosis caused widespread public concern in the 19th and early 20th centuries as the disease became common among the urban poor. At its peak the disease accounted for 1 in 4 deaths and even after TB was determined to be contagious, in the 1880s, it was put on a notifiable disease list in Britain; campaigns were started to stop people from spitting in public places, and the infected poor were “encouraged” to enter sanatoria that resembled prisons (the sanatoria for the middle and upper classes offered excellent care and constant medical attention). Whatever the benefits of the “fresh air” and labor in the sanatoria, even under the best conditions, 50% of those who entered died within five years (c. 1916).

Improvements in sanitation, vaccination, and other public health measures began reducing mortality rates, but not in time for Jesse and William. Then In 1946, the development of the antibiotic streptomycin made effective treatment and cure of TB a reality. Prior to the introduction of this medication, the only treatment was surgical intervention, including the “pneumothorax technique”, which involved collapsing an infected lung to “rest” it and allow tuberculous lesions to heal.

These measures drastically cut into the number of new cases and eventually the disease was brought under control. The cure came too late for William & Jesse, but it did finally come. Their stories are representative of scores of graves across the Dallas Pauper’s Cemetery.

TB in  Modern Times

It is easy in today’s modern world to think that TB has been eradicated from this earth, but presently, one-third of the world’s population is thought to be infected with TB. New infections occur in about 1% of the population each year. In 2016, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.3 million deaths. This makes it the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. More than 95% of deaths occurred in developing countries, and more than 50% in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. About 80% of people in many Asian and African countries test positive while 5–10% of people in the United States population test positive by the tuberculin test. Tuberculosis has been present in humans since ancient times.

Developed countries adopted milk pasteurization to prevent such disease and loss of life, and as a result milk is now widely considered one of the safest foods. Various states in the US began enacting mandatory dairy pasteurization laws with the first in 1947, and in 1973 the U.S. Federal Government required pasteurization of milk used in any interstate commerce.

However, hopes of a complete elimination of TB ended in the 1980s with the rise of drug-resistant strains and the AIDS epidemic.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkland_Memorial_Hospital

A wide variety of Dallas Morning News Articles:

1919 New Woodlawn Tubercular Hospital to be built by City and County1931 Plaza Hotel1901 Article where Dr. Koch dismisses Bovine Tuberculosis fears1917-12-171917-12-151917-12-051931 Plaza Hotel-Picture1925 Description of Hospitals available in Dallas, which includes address of Woodlawn1913 Woodlawn Inspection1917 New Ward opened to the Negroes1913 Woodlawn to Open1920 Woodlawn Almost Completed1928 Plight of Woodlawn Hospital1956 Roy GoggansPlaza Hotel location (Commerce &amp; Jefferson caddy corner to courthouse)1959 Progress on TB Fight, hospital remodeled1957 Improvements announced at Woodlawn1941 Woodlawn and Hutchins condition1948 Need to separate Woodlawn from Parkland1947 Streptmycin Fund1942 TB Threat1948 Parkland admits TB child1948 TB Hospital to open1943 Woodlawn1941 Woodlawn1918 Negroes appeal for separate hospital1947 Woodlawn Picnic1947-Aug 18 TB and Woodlawn1947-Dec Woodlawn1942 Article on need for replacement needed for Woodlawn Hospital-Article1932 Article showing heavy decrease in Bovine TB-Article1932 Ad for Pastuerized Ice Cream

Images:

Old Red Courthouse: By Leaflet – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30613971

JFK Memorial: By Carol M. Highsmith – Library of CongressCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2015631025Image download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/highsm/30700/30789a.tifOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.30789, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51292288

John Neely Bryan’s Cabin: By Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46698138

Union Station: By kla4067 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/84263554@N00/375031162/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7480491

Dealey Plaza: By Brodie319 – w:en:Image:Dealey_Plaza_2003.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1284918

Dealey Plaza

Old Red Courthouse

Dallas Couty Court

Union Station

John Neely Bryan Cabin

Babb Family Reunion 2019 (June 27-29th): Make your reservations now!:

Stable Mabel:

Izora Mabel (Lewis) Adkins was born near the turn of the century in Hunt County, Texas.

Mabel Adkins

As a Dallas Resident, you know the inclement weather has passed the City of Dallas once the Tornado Warning is moved to Hunt County. It lies to the North and East just past Rockwall County, which is adjacent to Dallas County. It’s one of those names that sticks in local residents minds after hearing of it your entire life. The County Seat of Hunt County is Greenville.

Mabel, was the daughter of Edward Thomas Lewis and Emma Willis (White) Lewis. She first appears in the 1900 Census of Hunt County, Texas (June 13, 1900), in the household of her parents as ‘Izora Mabel.’ The 1900 Census gives her age as 2 years and indicates her birth took place in May of 1898. The 1910 Census of

Clay County, Texas, gives her age as 12 years and her name as ‘Izora.’ The 1930 Census of Maricopa County, Arizona gives her name as ‘Mabel I.M. Adkins,’ aged 31 on her last birthday. (Since the 1930 Census was taken on April 9, 1930, she would not have been 32 until the following month). Mabel Adkins’ death certificate state her DOB as May 13, 1900; but, due to the consistency of the census records, it is believed that the year of 1900 is in error.

Mabel’s mother died in December of 1900 and her father remarried to Mrs. Theodosia Walker. The combined family had relocated by 1910 to Clay County, Texas, which is one of those County names that strikes fear into locals as it usually means the inclement weather is approaching Dallas. It lies just to the east of Wichita Falls along the Texas-Oklahoma border.

Mabel was a buyer for a clothing store when she met Roscoe Adkins, who was an advertising salesman, doing business with the store. One family story is that the store was owned by the Lewis family. Mabel’s family objected to her association with Roscoe Adkins and threatened to disown her if she continued her relationship with him. There is no evidence of any contact with her birth family after she left with Roscoe. Years after her death, members of the Lewis family still believed her to be alive.

Children of Roscoe & Mabel Adkins: (l-r) Billy Earl, Louis Delano “Dale”, Mabel Christine and Patricia Lorraine “Patsy/Patty”

Earl R. W. and Mabel I.M. Adkins were listed in the 1930 census of Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona, with their son Billy Earl. According to the census, they had been married about 2 years. In January of 1931, they were in Harlingen, Cameron County, Texas, where their daughter, Mabel Christine, was born. Patricia (Patsy/Patty) Lorraine was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in March of 1933 and Louis Delano ‘Dale’ Adkins was born in Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas, in November of 1934. Roscoe’s job as an advertising salesman kept the family moving.

Mabel died of hepatitis on November 2, 1935, in St. Paul’s Hospital in Dallas, Texas, leaving her husband and four small children. She was buried the next day in the Dallas City Cemetery, Dallas County, Texas, which is commonly referred to as the Dallas Pauper’s Cemetery. It was just recently put into use at the height of the Great Depression to handle the masses of people who died with no means to support their own burial.

Although her husband was present at the time of death to provide details of her life for the death certificate, the estrangement of the family is demonstrated by him not knowing her correct date of birth. There was less than 2 weeks between the onset of the Hepatitis and her death, so there was little time to prepare for this sad eventuality.

Hepatitis is inflammation of the liver tissue. Some people have no symptoms whereas others develop yellow discoloration of the skin and whites of the eyes, poor appetite, vomiting, tiredness, abdominal pain, or diarrhea. Hepatitis may be temporary (acute) or long term (chronic) depending on whether it lasts for less than or more than six months. Acute hepatitis can sometimes resolve on its own, progress to chronic hepatitis, or rarely result in acute liver failure. Over time the chronic form may progress to scarring of the liver, liver failure, or liver cancer. The most common cause worldwide is viruses. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis)

At the time of her death, Mabel & Roscoe lived at 2006 North St. Paul Avenue. There is no house at that address anymore. So, with the help of the Archivists at the Dallas Public Library, I went back and looked at some fire maps that had been created at the time by a company named Sanborn. These maps were used by insurance companies when selling Fire Insurance. They are an early form of a Mapsco and use a similar grid system to provide highly detailed maps of large cities. Here on Map 216 we find Roscoe & Mabel’s house. I’ve marked it with a Red Arrow to help you find it.

From the map we can see that they lived in a Single Family Dwelling. It was 2 stories and had a large front porch and a small rear porch. There appears to be some form of bay window on the south side of the building. There was a much smaller secondary residence on the back side of the main house that is marked as 2006 1/2, and some other outbuilding along the back of the property. The area is punctuated with
multi-family units and the only business that is called out by name is Remington Rand, which was a well known Typewriter Company. You can also see that McKinney Avenue is just steps away, which hosted the Texas Interurban Railway. The tracks are still in use today by the McKinney Avenue Trolley.

The Interurban failed just prior to Mabel’s death, but the tracks are still in use today. The McKinney Avenue Transit Authority was created to rejuvenate McKinney Avenue and has purchased a number of historic trolley cars and runs a free air conditioned ride for this popular street’s restaurants and nightlife.

The area has been in a constant state of evolution since her death and only a few landmarks still survive. That is because in 1958 The City of Dallas decided to acquire the land to build a freeway that would complete the loop around Downtown Dallas and connect Interstate 35-E to Central Expressway along the north side of downtown. They acquired and cleared much of the land by 1966 when this photo was taken. You can see the corridor starting to take shape. The freeway along the top of the picture is Central Expressway and the one at the bottom is 35-E. The diagonal street that comes in near the lower end of the corridor is McKinney Avenue where the trains ran. There are several blocks of buildings and a train station near the lower end (West) of the corridor which have yet to be cleared at the time of this picture. You can also see the unfinished Fairmont Hotel at 1717 N. Akard street. It was originally intended to become a senior living high rise and construction began in 1961. But progress stalled and the builder was unable to complete it. So, it sat this way until 1968 when it was purchased and completed as the Fairmont Hotel. I worked there in the late 80s for a short time. The hotel made it possible to find my location in this picture. Akard is on the far side of the hotel in this picture. To find Mabel’s place, You go 3 blocks to the left (North) and the next street up (East) is St. Paul. I’ve placed a red arrow on the location. You can see a spec of something at the proper location, but you can’t really make out what it is.

Aerial of cleared land for the Woodall Rogers freeway between Central Expressway at the top and Stemmons freeway (I-35E) at the bottom, 05/24/1966

Woodall Rogers Freeway as it looked from 1983-2012.

Problems continued to mount for the corridor which delayed construction for 25 years after it first started it was finally completed and opened to the public in 1983. It was submerged to allow bridges to pass over the freeway at their original grade. The freeway remained this way for almost 30 years when a new plan was devised to reconnect Downtown to Uptown by building a Deck over the freeway and placing a park on top of it. I have to admit I was a skeptic when I first learned of the project. Dallas summers are extremely hot and I just pictured a bunch of dead grass that had no chance of survival. The final product relieved all my fears and today it is one of the most beautiful places in the city. It is Dallas’ own little Central Park. In the picture of the park below you can just see McKinney Avenue peeking out from behind the building with the Greenspace on its roof, still cutting its diagonal path to the freeway. St. Paul is the street to the far left of the picture, the Dallas Museum of Art faces the Park along with the Nasher Sculpture Center. Just outside of the shot to the right is the entire Arts District which has been completely rebuilt over the last 20 years.

Klyde Warren Park-Luftbild

According to Roscoe’s youngest sister, Nora Adkins Anderson, Mabel was a very intelligent, educated woman and a ‘devout Methodist’ who loved her four children very much.”

As if this wasn’t enough, the freeway has been recently extended across the Trinity River with an amazing suspension bridge that is known as the Margaret Hunt Hill Memorial Bridge. The bridge is immediately recognizable as the work of Santiago Calatrava. The Deck park is off to the right of this picture.

I have digressed quite a way, but just like Mabel’s life of moving from place to place to follow the love of her life, the evolution of Mabel’s house has been anything but stable. From now one whenever I drive past the Park, I’ll think of Mable and envision the little 2 story wood frame house with a big porch sitting there amongst the regal splendor of the park.

For this story I have drawn upon a biography written by one of her descendants and pictures they placed on her Find-A-Grave Memorial page located here.

This Really Old House –Greeneville Sun 6/20/2018:

The Greeneville Sun did a really thoughtful piece about Seth’s Homestead to introduce the public to it. You can read the full sized article by clicking on the pictures below. It truly was a glorious weekend and I still have trouble believing that we completed it finally!

Note that once you click on the image, you will need to look in the bottom right corner on the View Full Size Link. Then on the resulting page, click on the image to expand it to full size. By default it comes up allowing you to see the whole page and because the paper is so tall it isn’t obvious. #FirstWorldProblems