by ©2025 Sarah Becker

Disease surveillance “is the continuing scrutiny of all aspects of occurrence and spread that are pertinent to control.” The increase in today’s measles epidemic boggles the mind. Measles, for example, are transmitted by droplet spread including oral contact (sneeze, cough) and hands (touch and contaminated surfaces).

Disease occurs when cells in the human body are damaged as a result of infection. Infectious diseases are caused by living organisms including the measles virus; bacteria, fungi, protozoa and parasitic worms. Infectious diseases spread by direct contact: via vectors like the mosquito; contaminated food, water and blood; and airborne droplets.

“Measles can cause serious health complications, especially in children younger than 5 years old,” the CDC confirmed. “If one person has measles, up to 9 out of 10 people nearby will become infected if they are not protected.” Measles affects multiple body systems, including the respiratory system—pneumonia being one of the most lethal complications.

Beginning in 1861, concurrent with the Civil War, Louis Pasteur developed his germ theory of disease. In 1861 U.S. Army bacteriologist George Sternberg isolated the pneumococcus bacterium “that is responsible for pneumonia.”  Sternberg’s announcement of his discovery “came almost simultaneously with Louis Pasteur’s statement of the same.”

Infectious diseases account for a quarter of the deaths worldwide.  As air travel continues, as weather patterns change; as food is now traded, as water and sanitation practices fail infectious diseases will spread. The city of Alexandria understood as early as 1810 excreta contaminated its groundwater.

Revolutionary War General George Washington understood the maladies associated with infectious diseases. He survived smallpox as a youth. Washington favored smallpox inoculation, so much so he countermanded the Continental Congress and ordered the Continental army immunized.

“Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army…we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the enemy,” Washington told Dr. William Shippen, Jr., in 1777.

“[General] Washington’s unheralded and little-recognized resolution to inoculate the Continental forces must surely rank among his most important decisions of the war,” historian Elizabeth A. Fenn wrote.

“Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you[r vaccine] has been extirpated,” President Thomas Jefferson wrote English physician Edward Jenner in 1806.

Some solutions, like repeated hand washing with soap, are simple. Others like those associated with COVID, a disease for which social distancing [crowd gathering] and or a reduction in sexual intimacy is required, involve greater effort. Prostitution, an example of the latter, flourished—from the Civil War [1861-1865] until the 1980s.

During the Civil War Alexandria’s Gadsby’s Tavern, then known as the City Hotel, was proven a “bawdy place.” (Commonwealth v. R.M. McClure, Proprietor of the City Hotel, 1864) According to the then Prostitution laws of Virginia “it shall be unlawful for any person to keep any bawdy place, or to reside in or at or visit, for immoral purposes, any such bawdy place.” According to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources “the Tavern buildings were considered a ‘tourist attraction’ for reason of their association with George Washington.”

“We did Patriot duty in the city of Alexandria until April 1863,” Union Army Lt. Charles E. Grisson wrote. “There were about seventy-five houses of ill fame in that [occupied] city and of course duty compelled us officers to visit them to see that everything was quiet, etc.”

Alexandria lost its civic reputation the 1890s. “Conditions in the city of 18,000 inhabitants were disgraceful,” The Washington Post exclaimed. On February 12, 1897 Police Chief James F. Webster announced “any person, rich or poor, white or black, leading an immoral life, where it can be proven, would be brought to justice.”

In 1993 Alexandria city employees discovered an ark, a shack that was part of a wooden barge buried in the dirt. Built in 1900, the ark was “the only known survivor among the thousands of houseboats, gambling barges and floating brothels that lined the Potomac River from the Civil War to after World War II.”

Small floating houses of prostitution were mostly painted red or blue. They flourished because Virginia had no jurisdiction over the Potomac River. “The Potomac is one of the few border rivers in the nation where the state line is not in the river but along the tidal high-water mark of one shore—Virginia’s shore,” The Washington Post explained.

In 1906 E.S. Leadbeater, a druggist and Councilman from Alexandria’s First ward, proposed “to reduce the appropriation for the city’s police department,” The Washington Post said. “Passage…meant a reduction in the salaries of everyone connected with the [poorly performing] department. [Leadbeater], called attention to a number of abuses [including] the admission of boys to houses of ill-repute, the unsanitary conditions of such places, and other alleged violations of the laws.”

Leadbeater agreed with Alexandria physician Kate Waller Barrett’s many on-going reform efforts. Barrett, who published Fourteen Years’ Work among Erring Girls in 1901, was a national spokesperson for the Florence Crittenton Mission.

Barrett favored “close police supervision” of bawdy places; no liquor sales to ill-reputed patrons, and “an honest living for the girls.” Alternative employment was often synonymous with $8 a week sweat shops.

“I guarantee to any girl who is now in a disreputable life, an opportunity to fit herself for any profession in life that she may desire to fill—provided that she has the ability and character that would be required,” Barrett wrote The Washington Post in 1913.” Many of the women working in Washington and Alexandria’s red light districts were college graduates.

Alexandria’s prostitution problem “became acute when Washington, D.C.’s red light district closed in early 1914.” At that time Judge Louis C. Barley notified the keepers of the various houses that he would not tolerate the harboring of any women from the city of Washington,” the Alexandria Gazette reported.

Alexandria’s segregated red-light district “located for more than half a century on the street that bears the name of the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee” finally went the way of on June 15, 1914. The National Florence Crittenton Mission then “offered to provide homes for any of the women who wished to reform,” There takers were few.

In 1979 Alexandria became the first Virginia jurisdiction to ban instant bingo, a church-supported form of the game sometimes linked to scandal. “Earlier in the year, Alexandria Prosecutor William L. Cowhig resigned after being acquitted of bribery trials involving bingo,” The Washington Post noted.

In 1980 the former president of the Alexandria Bar Association James L. Burkhardt was indicted by a federal grand jury “on charges of conspiring to funnel regular cash payments to unnamed public officials in order to ‘buy protection’ for a large Washington area prostitution ring.” Burkhardt served as legal adviser to sex parlor kingpin Louis M. Parrish. The cash payments were allegedly given to Prosecutor Cowhig.

“Prostitution is a difficult problem to eradicate,” police spokesperson Lucy Crockett said in 1984 regarding solicitations occurring mainly along the King Street-US Route 1 corridor. Corridor hook-ups continue but now the bawdy places are hotel rooms.

About the Author: Sarah Becker started writing for The Economist while a graduate student in England. Similar publications followed. She joined the Crier in 1996 while serving on the Alexandria Convention and Visitors Association Board. Her interest in antiquities began as a World Bank hire, with Indonesia’s need to generate hard currency. Balinese history, i.e. tourism provided the means. The New York Times describes Becker’s book, Off Your Duffs & Up the Assets, as “a blueprint for thousands of nonprofit managers.” A former museum director, SLAM’s saving grace Sarah received Alexandria’s Salute to Women Award in 2007.  Email abitofhistory53@gmail.com