Rose Hayward and the Cholera Ship: Part 1
Seventeen Days of Quarantine in New York Harbor
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Release Date: September 16, 2025
Prologue
In the summer of 1892, Asiatic Cholera crept silently across Europe. It struck the ancient port city of Hamburg, Germany hardest, spreading through its water supply while city officials concealed the truth from wealthy American holiday goers and desperate European immigrants alike. Despite recognizing the ongoing threat of cholera, authorities allowed America-bound ships to depart as scheduled, turning a blind eye to the horrors they were unleashing.
Among the passengers on one of those ships was Rose Hayward, a twenty nine year-old woman from Wisconsin returning home with her husband George after a season abroad.
But Rose was no ordinary traveler.
Born Rose Case in Madison, WI, she grew up in a family that prided itself on education, intellect, and refinement. Her father, Francis, was a professional musician and music teacher; her mother, Mary, descended from a well-off Boston family and often performed public recitations. Both insisted their five daughters be college educated, socially astute and genteel.
All excelled, but Rose, especially rose to the challenge. At just eighteen she was teaching Greek history and language at Madison High School and performing piano concertos to packed auditoriums. Soon after, she enrolled in the Conservatory of Music at Leipzig, Germany, where she studied both Greek and music, earning praise as a talented scholar and pianist.
Following graduation, the composer Moritz Moszkowski accepted Rose as his private pupil – a rare honor for any woman, much less an America one. Berlin critics admired her “exquisite delicacy and finish.” While Moszkowski himself gushed:
“…her artistic understanding is excellent, her comprehension intelligent and poetical, her execution easy and fine, and in every technicality, she is perfectly at home. In a word, Miss Case is as accomplished in the art as many a virtuoso of reputation.” 1
Back in Wisconsin, newspapers called Rose “a remarkable woman of accomplishment.” She was tall, blonde, charismatic, and confident — a musician, performer, scholar, orator and educator who spoke German as fluently as English, and captivated audiences wherever she went.
During Christmas week of 1890, in what was described as a “surprise to friends everywhere”, Rose married 35-year-old George Hayward Jr., a private banker from Merrill, WI, described as equally successful and well-born. Their marriage was announced in glowing terms: the union of a gifted woman and a rising, self-made financier. 2
This was the woman who boarded the Rugia in Hamburg that August: accomplished, admired, secure in her place in the world and social status, and wrapped in the innate and unquestioned belief that refinement and class set her apart and, perhaps more importantly, would protect her from whatever the future held in store.
From Paris gowns to death shrouds
“Just think of it—we drank the Elbe water and never knew it was the source of the city’s epidemic.”
Hamburg in 1892 was not the Hamburg Rose Hayward remembered from her many earlier visits. Germany’s principal port of trade was “indescribably filthy,” with streets that smelled of decay, and air “heavily laden with noxious odors.” Still, naïve to the threat around them, she and George had visited the city’s museums and art galleries, beer gardens and cafes, enjoying their last days on solid ground before departing on their long journey across the sea.
“Just think of it,” she later exclaimed, “we drank the Elbe water and never knew it was the source of the city’s epidemic.”
Rose and George didn’t know, but the aristocracy of merchant princes who ran the city surely did.
Fully aware of the outbreak, they and their minions had chosen silence and inaction rather than risk panic and disruption of trade. They’d also chosen deception, holding back news of the epidemic from the U.S. Consul in charge of certifying America-bound ships were safe to travel until the Rugia was on her way.
And so, with two trunks of beautiful Parisian gowns, fabrics and exotic gifts from Italy to Greece, Rose and George had joyfully boarded the German steamship Rugia on August 23, bound for New York — a journey of 10 days.
Rose was one of 100 cabin passengers on the Rugia, most of whom were, like her, well-heeled Americans returning home from European Grand Tours and summers away.
Steerage, by contrast, was crowded with 437 immigrants from 16 nations – Russians, Syrians, Poles, Germans, Hungarians and others from across Europe, Asia and Africa.
Different passengers, different backgrounds and futures, but one goal: a safe and uneventful passage to America.
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Despite their common goal, life onboard the Rugia was markedly different depending on which class of passage had been booked.
Rose, George and the other cabin passengers ate their fill at tables laid with linen and fine china and conversed easily as hired musicians played quietly in the background. They strolled the upper deck while breathing in clean ocean air, then retired to private quarters with soft beds and solitude.
Below deck, steerage passengers shared dirty, cramped quarters, slept fitfully on blankets and straw mats often infected with lice and rats, and were provided with only enough nutrition to hold off starvation.
Perhaps the most critical difference, and the one that would mean the different between life and death as the Rugia steamed toward New York, came down to sanitation.
Upper deck passengers were served individual glasses of water which had been boiled to ensure purity. Lower deck passengers scooped water from the Elbe River out of buckets with common ladles or tin cups.
And cabin passengers had access to shared and private lavatories with flush toilets and wash basins cleaned and maintained by stewards. Steerage passengers shared ten crude toilets and washrooms, eight for women and children, and just two for men. And all were cleaned with a hose.
“The floor and seats were always wet, and, as the individual compartments were so very short and narrow, it was impossible to go in or out without rubbing one's clothes against the wet and often dirty floor, step, and seat. In the wash room, leading to the toilets, the water often stood inches deep on the floor.” 3
It was a perfect storm.
Poor sanitation and hygiene. Overcrowding. Contaminated food and water, and malnutrition — everything cholera needed to wreak suffering, panic and death on the Rugia’s unsuspecting passengers and crew.
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The first days of the voyage seemed normal. Then five days out, the first death occurred. A nameless, faceless mother in steerage — at least to Rose and her fellow cabin passengers. The ship’s officers assured them death wasn’t unexpected among below deck passengers, they often arrived unwell. The dead immigrant was one such example, they declared. There was nothing to worry about.
Soon, however, there was a second death — the woman’s child. Then a man.
Cabin passengers like Rose and George began whispering among themselves. But whispers turned to concern after one of their own stayed up to witness for himself what was going on in the dead of night. And what he reported back was chilling: a body wrapped in a canvas shroud, secured with rope and weights, thrown overboard. Worse still, after the deed crew members had aggressively disinfected themselves, the deck and anything that had come in contact with the body.
Soon after, protocols shifted. Cabin passengers were confined to the upper decks, visitation between cabin and steerage passengers was no longer allowed, and several stewarts were missing and rumored to have been reassigned to care for the sick.
Panic quickly spread among Rose and her social peers that some terrible disease was raging “down there”, among “them”.
By the time the Rugia neared New York on September 3, six passengers had died — all in steerage. Rose recalled her “nerves terribly wrought up by the awful fear which had gradually developed as a result of so many mysterious deaths.”
Still, she clung to the hope that once they reached the familiar shores of New York City, their ordeal would be over.
That’s not what happened.
When the Rugia finally passed through the Narrows and into the Upper Bay of New York’s harbor, it wasn’t welcomed. It was stopped.
And Rose’s ordeal had just begun.
Copyright 2025 Lori Olson White
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End Notes
Much of the content for this pieces originates from “Kept in Quarantine: Mrs. Hayward, Nee Case, Tells of a Terrible Experience. Seventeen Days on Board a Cholera-Infested Vessel. Burial at Sea – a Yellow Flag – Dr. Jenkins – Liberty – Fireworks,” which appeared in the Iowa County Democrat, Mineral Point, WI, on October 14, 1892, P. 7.
1 “Miss Rose Case: She is Highly Complimented by a Milwaukee Paper”, Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, WI, October 13, 1890, P. 1.
2 “Rose Case Married: Surprise for her Many Friends in Madison. Notice in the Sentinel. A Most Flattering Testimonial to the Lady’s Gifts as a Scholar and a Musician”, Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, WI, December 22, 1890, P. 1.
3 “In the Steerage," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume 31, no. 185 (October 1865): 594-598.
You pulled me in with the story of Rose returning from her European tour. What a common American myth: that one's privileges provide immunity from strife.
God help me but I love a good Cholera story!