Thread by @charlesjaco1

Thread. A pandemic story.

Millions of red state rural Trumpistas think COVID-19 is a hoax, lib hysteria, & something that won't affect them out in the country.
Let me introduce you to Midco, Missouri. Finding Midco is like stumbling upon a Mayan temple complex in the Yucatan. 1/

Just north of Carter County Road 148, a smokestack rises incongruously in the woods. As you get closer, you discover you're walking on an old street. Rusted rail tracks to and from nowhere snake through the tall grass. Crumbled foundations mark where the buildings stood. 2/

102 yrs ago, Midco, MO was a boom town. Named for the Mid-Continent Iron Co, Midco was home to an iron smelter, where iron ore was hauled by rail to be purified into iron at the smelter. Why put a smelter making iron for the war effort in the middle of the Ozarks? Charcoal. 3/

The iron ore was heated over charcoal to extract the iron. And the hard Missouri hickory growing in the hills and hollows nearby made excellent charcoal. Still does. At its peak, Midco had 2,000 people and 200 company-town houses built by Mid-Continent Iron. 4/

But in the autumn of 1918, the flu pandemic that would kill over 50 million worldwide hit Midco. A trip to St. Louis took 3 days by horse-drawn wagon, a full 24 hours using one of the few motor vehicles in the area. Midco was so isolated, it might as well have been on Mars. 5/

But isolation from major population centers didn't help. By October 1918, the dead were increasing so fast that local volunteers formed grave-digging gangs. Since Midco was only s few miles north of the Jaco family homestead, my grandfather was one of the volunteers. 6/

My father was 7 at the time. He'd watch, sometimes holding a kerosene lantern at night, as the men worked around-the-clock digging graves. They didn't dig mass graves. Each person, or at least each family, got their own grave. It was the "decent Christian" thing to do. 7/

One family named Sanders was wiped out, two adults and six children. The digging continued, 24 hours a day. Rough wooden crosses marked each grave. A century later, we still don't know the exact death toll in Midco. Estimates range from 100 to more than 300. 8/

The wooden crosses eventually weathered away. In the Midco Colony Cemetery nearby, which still exists, only a half-dozen of the graves are marked. World War I ended. Govt contracts gone, Mid Continent Iron abandoned the town. Some remnants still stand. 9/

If a settlement as isolated as Midco, Missouri could be decimated and wiped from memory, small cities and towns in the 21st century of interstates and jet travel aren't insulated from COVID-19. Even if the residents refuse to believe it. 10/-end

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