LOCAL NEWS — The Moore County Historical Society will meet on Sunday, November 14 at the Masonic Lodge in Lynchburg beginning at 2 p.m. November’s speaker with be local historian Dr. Michael Bradley who will present COVID is Not Our First Rodeo – The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.
Dr. Bradley will discuss the Yellow Fever outbreak that ripped through the Lower Mississippi Valley in the late 1800s. In particular it affected the Mississippi River Valley, which includes St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans. In Memphis, nearly 85 percent of the population contracted the fever with over 5,000 deaths. Memphis, a city of 50,000, had outbreaks in 1855, 1867 and 1873, with each outbreak getting progressively worse.
Dr. Bradley is a native of the Tennessee-Alabama state line region near Fayetteville. He earned his Bachelors of Arts degree from Samford University, and took a Masters of Divinity at New Orleans Seminary. He also earned an M. A. and the Ph. D. in U.S. History from Vanderbilt University in 1970. He taught U.S. History at Motlow State for six years. During his teaching career Dr. Bradley received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant and a National Sciences Foundation Grant. He also was made a Johns Hopkins University Fellow.
Dr. Bradley is the author of several books on the Civil War period including Tullahoma: The 1863 Campaign and With Blood and Fire: Behind Union Lines in Middle Tennessee, both published by Burd Street Press; Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Escort & Staff in War and Peace, Pelican Press; It Happened in the Civil War, a second edition of which appeared in 2010, published by Rowman and Littlefield; and Home Fires in the Line of Fire, published as part of an anthology titled Sister States/Enemy States about the war in Tennessee and Kentucky, published by the University of Tennessee.
All Moore County Historical Society meeting are free and open to the general public. For more information, contact Mike Northcutt at 931-434-5797 or George Stone at 931-581-2621. •
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