Vermont tasted that year the bitter cup of desolation.
A dire scourge of spotted fever, or “plague,” the doctors called it, broke out, severest in Montpelier. Consternation was great among the Sabbath-abiding folk who claimed solemnly that the affliction was due to the worldly ways and “flunk and flummux” of the “foreigners” who came from other states to pass the summer in the Green Mountains. Even the women of Vermont, themselves, had taken to wearing laces, ribbands, frills and furbelows—most unbecoming in God-fearing females!
Stagnant water stood in pools, here and there, houses were damp, there were no crops, and all food was mouldy and unwholesome, for lack of sunshine.
In Montpelier men went from house to house, carrying long bathing vessels, and such of the women as had not yet been attacked with the “plague” bathed the stricken ones in an infusion of hemlock boughs. Doctors bled them and dosed them with teas more or less harmful made of ginseng, pleurisy-root and marshmallow. Fresh air, sunshine and pure water with proper nourishment would have been better, but in those days bleeding and herb-teas were the two panaceas for all ills.
In Williston, Dame Susannah Wells, who had reached the ripe age of one hundred and four years and seen her descendants die year after year of old age—without warning fell ill with the plague and died. Had it not been for this her acquaintances had long since come to the conclusion she would have lived forever. Children and babies were mowed down with equal impartiality by the Reaper; men and women succumbed; but Morgan’s hardihood saved him from any ill effects of the long, wet season.
Events in his life, following 1811, were not of great importance and may be passed over until Stone put him up for sale in Burlington, at the stable of the Rev. Daniel Clark Sanders, President of the fine College on the hill. There he stayed for a long time, as he was growing old, they said, and no one wanted to buy him. President Sanders was quite willing, for he had the use and care of him all that while. Now and then Stone came to the stable with a prospective buyer, but a trade was never consummated.
As a convenient dooryard Ira Allen had given a space of fifty acres around the College, called The Green. It was still full of stumps and piles of brush, but made a delightful place for the cows and horses of the town to graze, and here Morgan had many agreeable experiences.
The merry students, passing by, gave him friendly greeting always and a dainty of some kind from their lunches; he learned to know the whistle of many and whinneyed to them as they ran toward him.
Often, as he stood nibbling grass he saw a strange looking youth limp across the Green with never a nod or greeting for him or any one else. Absorbed, stern of expression, and morose, this lad was destined to rise to prominence, the like of which could not be foreseen in one without influence, the son of a poor, hard working widow. This lame boy was none other than young Thaddeus Stevens, who, by industry and perseverance, gained his book-learning in Burlington and later graduated at Dartmouth College.
Burlington was now a very different place from the logging camp Morgan first remembered. The old wharf, made of a few logs fastened together, at the foot of King’s Street, had given way to a fine new one; houses had taken the place of camps and were scattered as far as the Winooski.