How American Struggled to Bury Bodies During the 1918 Flu Pandemic-- Part 3: Boston and Philadelphia

Gravediggers at Boston's New Calvary Cemetery were spotted dumping corpses out of coffins could be used again.  The War Industries Board  ordered casket makers to manufacture only plain caskets and immediately cease production on "all fancy trimmed and couch and split panel varieties.  It limited caskets sizes for adults  to five feet, nine inches and six feet, 3 inches.

The worst horrors were seen in Philadelphia, where the number of deaths approached 1,000 a day at the pandemic's peak.  Entire neighborhoods were  draped in crepe that was mounted on front doors to mark deaths inside.

Civic leaders  recruited the J.G. Brill Company, a streetcar manufacturer, to construct thousands of  rudimentary boxes in which to bury the dead, while desperately needed coffins arrived in the city under armed guard.

Five hundred bodies crowded the city morgue, which had a capacity for only  36 corpses.    The city scrambled to open  six supplementary morgues and placed bodies in cold storage plants.  Some Philadelphia  residents were  unceremoniously tossed into mass graves  that had been hollowed out by steam shovels.

How America Struggled to Bury Bodies in 1918 Flu Pandemic-- Part 2: Shortages of Gravediggers and Coffins

Cemeteries struggled to keep up with the mounting death toll.  With gravediggers absent from work -- either because they had gotten the flu or were afraid they would--  grieving families were sometimes forced to  excavate graves for their loved ones.

In New Brunswick, New Jersey, 15 workhouse inmates were handed spades and shovels under the watchful eyes of guards.  In Baltimore, city employees were called into  emergency duty as gravediggers while soldiers from Fort Meade were pressed into service to bury a three-week backlog of 175 bodies at Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Casket companies, already hard-pressed to supply coffins for  the thousands of U.S. Doughboys killed overseas, could not keep up with this increased demand.  Facing a desperate shortage in the nation's capital, District of Columbia Commissioner Louis Brown hijacked two train cars filled with 270 coffins bound for Pittsburgh and rerouted it to the city hospital under armed guard.