Look at the dates: 1890-1918; 1878-1918; 1896-1918; 1917-1918 … Every person buried on this snowy slope in Barre, Vt, died within days, weeks of each other. “It’s pretty humbling,” said Brian Zecchinelli.
Nearly 200 died that Fall during that other pandemic, the 1918 so-called Spanish Flu.
Zecchinelli and his wife, Karen, own the nearby Wayside Restaurant now. It’s become a Vermont institution. “Effie Ballou opened the Wayside in July of 1918, and two months later the pandemic hits Barre,” he said.
Zecchinelli has never stopped thinking about how little he knew about the 1918 flu – and the fact that the grandfather he never met was one of its victims. He died at 35, on October 10 of that terrible year. Germinio Zecchinelli, like so many other Italian stone cutters, had moved to Barre to quarry granite, to carve the nation’s gravestones (and often each others’, as it turned out).
“The Spanish Flu is often referred to as the ‘forgotten flu,'” Zecchinelli told correspondent Martha Teichner. “And if we had anything to do with it, it wasn’t gonna be forgotten, Germinio and all the others. We wanted to do something to memorialize him and the 50 million others worldwide that died.”
Read more at CBS News.