Philadelphia was the capital of the United States from 1790 to 1800. In 1793, a yellow fever plague struck the city and killed over 5,500 of the 55,000 residents as nobody knew the disease was spread by mosquitoes. Philadelphia was mostly swampland at the time, providing ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Another yellow fever epidemic in 1853 killed 20,000 people in New Orleans, and another in 1878 killed 20,000 more, demonstrating the ongoing impact of mosquito-borne diseases before the widespread use of DDT in the mid-1900s helped curb their spread.

1. Philadelphia: Then and Now

2. East view of Philadelphia State House 1790
(Independence Hall)

4. Looking at Philadelphia from the Jersey shoreline of the Delaware
River (Camden).

10. Description: Philadelphia was the United States capital from 1790 to 1800.
President Washington stayed in the Robert Morris house on High Street, a threestory mansion used as a living space, reception area, and an office.

11. Washington’s House site, Market Street

12. 2nd and Race Street

13. CHRIST CHURCH
2nd Street, above Market

14. Inside Christ Church

15. Christ Church Burial Gound

16. Earliest known photograph of
Philadelphia (1838)

17. Penn’s Landing from Camden, 1790s

18. Shipbuilding in Philadelphia, 1790s

19. Benjamin Rush
Stephen Girard
George Washington

20. Charles Willson Peale
Richard Allan

21. Mosquito Plagues
In 1793 a Yellow Fever plague struck Philadelphia. Ten percent of Philadelphia's
population died. Five thousand five hundred people out of Philadelphia's 55 thousand
residents perished because nobody knew that Yellow Fever was spread by
mosquitoes. In 1853 a Yellow Fever plague hit New Orleans. Twenty thousand died. In
1878 another epidemic, claiming another 20 thousand. During the American Civil War
over 10 thousand Union soldiers died from malaria. Malaria was the leading cause of
death of the workers who built the Panama Canal, with over a thousand construction
workers contracting the disease during the "ditch digging" in the Isthmus of Panama.
When DDT began to be mass produced in 1946, 2.7 million per year were dying just
from malaria alone

23. This building, still standing today just near the airport, was used as a
hospital for the Yellow Fever victims of 1793. There were no effective
cures, and so hundreds of people died. This photograph was taken in
1856.

24. Philadelphia was mostly swampland in the 18th and 19th centuries—the
perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.

27. “Yellow Jack Coming for a Visit”
--Cartoon that appeared in an early
Philadelphia newspaper.
--This cartoon personifies Yellow
Fever.

28. The Black Death was a
plague that swept through
the Middle Ages destroying
over half of Europe.
The Yellow Fever
epidemics were often
compared with the “Black
Death.”