On October 11, 1855, somewhere in Ouachita Parish, Sarah Garrett, then thirteen years old, sat writing a letter to her fifteen year old brother Frank who was at school out of state. In it was the following passage:
” I forgot to say that Lou McEnery was dead. She died in Norfolk of the Y. fever. She died on the 15th of September. Col. McEnery did not receive the news until very lately.”
Sarah was talking about fifteen year old Louisa K. McEnery, one of three daughters and four sons of Henry O’Neal McEnery and Caroline Haskins Douglass. Louisa’s parents were from Virginia, and in 1855, her father sent her to her mother’s home state from Louisiana to attend a girls boarding school in Norfolk. Louisa’s mother had passed away five years earlier when she was ten. That same year, a ship landed at Norfolk, which had been infected with the dreaded Yellow Fever. Mosquitoes carried on board as well as those in Virginia quickly spread the disease. Over 3,000 people in the city of Norfolk died from it, including young “Lou”. The Richmond Enquirer of September 21, 1855 mentioned her death in a report on the fever:
“Miss McHenry [sic] of Monroe, La., at Rev. A.S. Smith’s.”
Louisa was carried to her parents’ hometown of Petersburg, VA and buried in the Blandford Cemetery there.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9429377/louisa_keller-mcenery
Louisa’s brothers grew up to become powerful men in their own right and her sisters married into the Fenner and Caldwell families. What could Louisa have done had she lived and had children of her own? Such a shame.
In an ironic twist in Sarah’s letter to Frank, she mentioned some local residents had yellow fever and closes with the line,
“Brother, I expect I shall have to close as the mosquitoes are biting me so very bad.”
Ouachita Parish History Tidbits 