It was January of 1893. My great-great grandfather, James Grant Johnston, was on an extended trip out west, through Iowa to Colorado, and he’d written a letter back home to his remaining children.

His letter told of visits with his children’s cousins, who couldn’t wait to get to Texas in the hopes that they could get ponies to ride all over the place:

I guess you all would like some ponies, also. When you all get large enough, we will have some ponies to ride and drive. That is, if you are good children and learn all your lessons.

I wish that had been the magic elixir to receive ponies for Christmas when I was a child, but I digress.

James was a superintendent of the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Railroad (which became Southern). His children were ensconced in Knoxville with his sister, Margaret Johnston Lyman. Knoxville wasn’t on the original trajectory for his life. A plantation child from Halifax, North Carolina, he and his siblings had all been moved to Davenport, Iowa, by their abolitionist uncle after the Civil War, from whom he learn the railroad business.

After college at Yale and marrying a Connecticut girl, Florence Isobel Linsley, he eventually settled in Marshalltown, Iowa, as a superintendent for Central Iowa Railroad and fathered six children. By 1892, his oldest, Grant, was in poor health, and he took a year’s sabbatical and moved the family to Chalybeate Springs, Georgia, under the common instruction in that century that his child needed a more forgiving climate than Iowa winters.

Georgia summers proved to be no picnic, either, and ultimately laid a cloud of doom on his family. Everyone came down with diphtheria, one of the scourges of that time. On August 16, he lost his daughter, Florence, and two days later his wife of the same name. He took his family to North Carolina to visit family and while there, Grant’s weakened body gave out on Sept. 16. Then the family moved to Knoxville.

As tragic as that whole tableau was, this was simply life in the 19th century as well as a good part of the 20th. People had large swaths of their families, especially children, wiped out by disease. On his 13th birthday, James lost his father, a military doctor in a North Carolina Confederate regiment, to typhoid pneumonia. Casualties from the Civil War are estimated between 660-750,000, two-thirds of which were from the rampant spread of disease. For every three killed on the battlefield, five died from illness, with typhoid and dysentery being the heaviest hitters.

James’ eventual daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, Nettie Cate Hoskins, was orphaned by the age of 10. Her mother died of complications from childbirth when Nettie was only 3. Her father, also a doctor, died seven years later from what was commonly called consumption but we know as tuberculosis.

The Beverly Park Place and Rehab facility out Tazewell Pike had its beginnings as a quarantine and treatment center for indigent tuberculosis patients. There were not yet any antibiotics to treat it (and what exists now is a considerable and lengthy course of treatment), but efforts were made to isolate those with active disease to keep it from spreading. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, airborne and deadly, though nowhere near as prevalent and fatal in the developed world as it used to be, present headlines notwithstanding. Forewarned is forearmed.

By the late 1950s, as TB cases waned, one building at Beverly Hills Sanitorium/ East Tennessee Tuberculosis Hospital was converted for indigent convalescent care. Eventually, the TB care fell away because the prevalence of TB declined sharply. As did diphtheria and typhoid and several other plagues of the 19th century. We’ve made astounding leaps in just the past century.

The reasons for that are many: antibiotics, vaccinations, sanitation and pasteurization. The simple process of pasteurizing milk and dairy products (which began in the U.S. in the 1890s) removes a litany of harmful bacteria, among them TB, typhoid and diphtheria. The Knoxville Health Department led the charge in Tennessee, regulating dairies to reduce the circulation of contaminated milk. By the 1940s, pasteurization was required statewide. All I can say to those who like to take their chances on raw milk with a side of cow patty is may the dilution ratio be ever in your favor.

James remarried just over a year after my great-great grandmother’s death, on Christmas Eve 1893 to Miss Tennessee Hoskins (Nettie’s aunt) and had another son, William Hoskins Johnston born in 1894. We knew him as Uncle Major, and I can remember visiting him when I was child on what was left of his father’s dairy farm near Schaad Road at Oak Ridge Highway (James reportedly had the first herd of Guernsey dairy cows in Tennessee). James was also director of the Union National Bank. He died on New Year’s Eve, 1926.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

Sources: McClung digital collection-Knox County Library, Knoxville Journal digital archives, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, American Battlefield Trust, Tennessee Encyclopedia