By Dan Cherry
On a local history social media page, Lenawee County historians were asked for more information about paraphrased “the 1908 smallpox epidemic in Jasper that killed half the town.”
Additionally, did you know, the requests read, that Jasper was a city of 8,000 at the time, the same size as Adrian, and that 4,000 people died in Jasper, requiring residents to burn half the town to stem the spread of the disease.
The story is briefly repeated on several online websites, but all without citation and the appearance one source copied and pasted what the other said.
I immediately began conferring with other area historians, including Bob Wessel, on the reported event. None of us had heard of an outbreak of smallpox that killed thousands in Lenawee County.