(The real-world town of North Tarrytown renamed itself “Sleepy Hollow” in honor of Irving’s story in 1999.) And it was here that Irving supposedly first heard the rumor of a headless Hessian buried near the Old Dutch Church, who “rode forth to the scenes of battle in nightly quest of his head,” as he would later write in his most famous tale, “ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In truth, the ancestry of Irving’s Headless Horseman is not so easily traced-Sir Walter Scott deserves some credit for the hellish equestrian, too-but knowledgeable readers can find Irving’s own youthful experience of plague written upon every “bewitched” surface of the fictional village of Sleepy Hollow.
The young writer, as Brian Jay Jones notes in his biography, was smitten by both the pastoral tranquility of the Hudson Valley region, and its less-than-tranquil ghost stories. These were the conditions that brought a teenage Irving to Tarrytown, in Westchester County, to stay with his friend James Kirke Paulding. Families that could not afford to seek “pure air” suffered not only from the virus, but from the terror of their neighbors: infected neighborhoods were marked with yellow flags or roped off, and few doctors were willing to treat the disease, the symptoms of which included the kind of bleeding and vomiting best left to horror films. Yellow fever threw a bright light on economic inequality in the affected cities: families with the means to do so, like Irving’s, fled the “miasmic” urban environment for more healthful climates. The epidemics exacerbated post-colonial racial prejudice and encouraged xenophobia Philadelphia built the nation’s first quarantine station in response to a 1793 outbreak. They even pointed the finger at the luggage of foreign sailors. They blamed West Indian refugees and shipments of rotten coffee. Medical professionals speculated that it was caused by slum conditions in city centers (including landfill and stagnant water-this was closest to the mark). Yellow fever, which is spread by mosquitoes, was poorly understood at the turn of the 19th century. Irving, a native New Yorker, made his first trip up the Hudson River to Tarrytown in 1798, at age 15.Īt that time, New York City was in the grip of its tenth epidemic of yellow fever, a viral disease that killed 5,000 residents of Philadelphia in a single year and was on track to do as much cumulative damage in New York. Sound familiar? It did to Washington Irving, too.
An indiscriminate infection that holds a community captive.
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