Young Florence community weathered epidemic in 1876
by mark Cowling | PinalCentral
The Florence American Legion building dates back to 1874, when it was the second E.N. Fish Store. A few years later it was the Joseph Collingwood & Co. store and Wells Fargo office. Mark Cowling|PinalCentral
Florence suffered a smallpox epidemic in 1876 that eventually spread to more than 200 people in and around the community.
One of the first to be stricken was John Carroll, the local telegraph operator. The operator who came from Phoenix to take over for him, Charles M. Clark, recalled the tense months of the outbreak decades later in a newspaper column preserved at the Pinal County Historical Society Museum in Florence.
(The museum at 715 S. Main St. remains closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Clark wrote that at the time the Florence telegraph office was the most important and most lucrative in the Arizona territory. This was in large part due to business related to the newly established mining town of Globe.
