Solomon Bates of Haddam was born in 1737 and died at the age of 22 of smallpox. Shailerville/Tylerville Cemetery
His short life was full of tragedy and hardship. He was the second oldest child of David and Mary Bates and had eight younger siblings and an older brother, David. His mother died when he was just 16 and his father died three years later when he was only 19. Solomon and his brother were now responsible for their young sisters and brothers, the youngest was only 4. It appears that just three months after his father’s death Solomon married the widow Hannah Spicer. A year later they had a daughter Hannah.
By 1759 Solomon had contracted smallpox, a dreadful disease. Small pox, a highly contagious disease, was a major cause of death in the 1700s. It was a virus resulted in a rash which turned into liquid filled blisters and a high fever. If it didn’t kill you, long term complications included scars, blindness and limb deformity. In early Connecticut many towns would bury their small pox victims in a separate cemetery far in the woods so towns people could not be infected. Towns, including Haddam, had pox houses where the infected would be isolated and ride out the disease without infecting others. Many of these houses were located far in the woods and were burned following use.
Later, Haddam was at the forefront of small pox inoculation and Dr. Hezekiah Brainerd opened one of the state’s first small pox hospitals on Walkley Hill Road in 1787. The town paid him 10 shillings per person to inoculate. Although it took almost 200 more years, small pox was finally eradicated globally in 1977.
