… Continuing from the Night Thread, there are other smallpox victims buried in the remote woods of Cape Cod Massachusetts.

More than 50 years after the smallpox outbreak that felled Thomas Ridley Jun’r,  and many more victims, another outbreak flared up on the Outer Cape. Those infected in Provincetown were kept in a small building called a Pestilence House or Pest House. The Pest House was located in a remote spot, deep in the woods, away from the main settlements of Provincetown in order to keep the patients safely away from the rest of the town. As the patients of the Pest House died they were buried in a makeshift graveyard on the grounds nearby. From 1855 to 1873 fourteen people in all are buried in the cemetery.  Their small headstones were numbered but otherwise unmarked. This was most likely done to protect family members from the  backlash  of townsfolk looking to place blame somewhere or on somebody.

In 2015, a memorial was erected at Winthrop Street Cemetery in Provincetown to honor the fourteen Pest House victims.

Today all traces of the Pest House building  are long gone and the cemetery lies within the boundaries of the Cape Cod National Seashore. It is a short hike along a barely trodden path through some woods and there is no signage to mark the gravesite. About half of the burial markers are gone, but the ones that remain serve as a striking reminder of an epidemic long past