Oscar’s Tale

Oscar Wilson’s life is known to few people alive today. His grave sits in a small cemetery alongside a rural road that cuts through farm fields in a southern section of Champlain, NY. He shares his gravestone with his parents and three brothers in the back corner of the cemetery. Were it not for that grave, his life would largely be lost to time. With that grave as a starting point, however, we can use Oscar’s life as a way to shed light on the harsh reality of life for children in the 19th century.

Oscar was born in 1845 to parents Leander and Betsy Wilson. His parents wed in 1839 and immediately began to expand their family with the births of Mariah, Alonzo, Mary, Louisa, and George before Oscar joined the family in 1845.¹

Oscar’s early life would have revolved around the rhythm of farming. The Wilson family operated one of the smallest farms in Champlain. At only six acres, their farm was the third smallest of the 220 farms located in the town of Champlain in 1850. Their farm was so small that it was entirely missed when OJ Lamb prepared a map of the town in 1856.² Despite its diminutive size, the Wilson farm was still a complex operation. The 1850 agricultural census reports that the family had two horses, a milk cow, two heads of cattle, five sheep, and one pig. The family also produced 50 bushels of both corn and potatoes, eight pounds of wool, 75 pounds of butter, and five tons of hay. The family also sold slaughtered livestock, market gardens, and homemade goods worth $31.³ While Oscar was too young to have worked on the farm, his siblings were undoubtedly important contributors to the farm economy. Historian Steven Mintz notes that in antebellum rural families, “children were seen as economic assets” and often assumed labor responsibilities from the age of five or six.⁴ The Wilson family farm was both a workplace and a home, where intergenerational cooperation helped rural families survive amid uncertain economic conditions. The presence of Oscar’s grandmother Rachel in the 1850 census underscores the extended family importance on rural farms.⁵

The only appearance Oscar makes in the historical record is a single entry in the 1850 mortality schedule. We learn from that record that four-year-old Oscar died on June 6th, 1849 after a week-long bout with croup.⁶ While hardly known today, croup was a dreaded infection in the 19th century. The term “croup” was used broadly to describe a variety of respiratory conditions in children marked by a barking cough and labored breathing. Modern scholars recognize that 19th-century cases of fatal croup were often caused by diphtheria—a bacterial infection that obstructed the airway with a thick membrane, often leading to suffocation.⁷ Oscar’s rapid demise is tragically consistent with the severe and often untreatable nature of diphtheritic croup. Of the 52 people listed on the 1850 mortality schedule for Champlain, croup was the second most frequent cause of death at five cases (~10%). The only more frequent cause of death was consumption (tuberculosis) with six cases. The primary difference between the two inflictions is that consumption killed mostly adults in Champlain (only one person who died of consumption was under the age of twelve), while all of the lethal cases of croup targeted young children. Four-year-old Oscar was the oldest child to die of croup in Champlain’s 1850 mortality schedule.⁸

When Oscar died in 1849, he represented the first death in the Wilson family and was one of the earliest burials in Waters Cemetery in southern Champlain near the border with the town of Chazy. He would be joined in the cemetery by infant brother Johnny in 1853 and older brothers Alonzo and George in the early 1860s. Parents like Leander and Betsy Wilson lived with this uncertainty as an unavoidable fact of life. In the absence of effective antibiotics, antitoxins, and vaccines, children were vulnerable to sudden and often unstoppable infections that meant roughly 40% of children in the United States died before the age of five, with infectious diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and tuberculosis accounting for the majority of deaths.⁹ Oscar’s grave, simple though it may be, is emblematic of an era in which early death was not a statistical abstraction but a lived and recurring trauma. His brief life, preserved only in stone and a single line on the mortality schedule, remains a powerful lens into the fragile world of childhood in 19th-century rural America.

Footnotes:

1. 1850 US census, Clinton County, New York, population schedule, Champlain Township, dwelling 2567, family 2781, Leander Wilson household; digital image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 2025); citing National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls.
2. Ligowsky, A. Map of Clinton Co., New York. Philadelphia: O.J. Lamb, 1856. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009583837/.
3. 1850 US census, Clinton County, New York, US Selected Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, 1850-1880, Champlain Township, Archive Collection Number: A2; Roll: 2; Page: 803; Line: 14. Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 2025); citing National Archives Microfilm Publication.
4. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 55.
5. 1850 US census, Clinton County, New York, population schedule, Champlain Township, dwelling 2567, family 2781, Leander Wilson household; digital image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 2025); citing National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls.
6.  U.S. Census Mortality Schedules, New York, 1850-1880; New York State Education Department, Office of Cultural Education; Albany, New York; Year: 1850; Roll: M1; Line Number: 11. Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 2025).
7. Humphreys, Margaret. “Childhood Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine.” The Journal of Pediatrics 126, no. 1 (1995): 135–141.
8. U.S. Census Mortality Schedules, New York, 1850-1880; New York State Education Department, Office of Cultural Education; Albany, New York; Year: 1850; Roll: M1; Line Number: 11. Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 2025).
9. Haines, Michael R., Estimated Life Tables for the United States, 1850-1900 (September 1994). NBER Working Paper No. h0059, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=190396