[music playing] In 2020, Lexington, along with the rest of Kentucky and the country, faced an epidemic that cost many lives and frightened the population.

But almost 200 years before that, in 1833, another epidemic confronted the citizens of Lexington.

It too had spread through the country and its onslaught brought fear, killing more than 500 people in Lexington alone in less than one year.

The epidemic was cholera.

[music playing] [music playing] Cholera is a waterborne bacterial disease often transferred from human waste in contact with drinking water.

Once consumed, its victims suffer dehydration, losing liquids, and eventually their lives.

The 1833 cholera epidemic certainly changed the face of Lexington for a period of time.

Cholera was the sort of thing that would instill sheer terror in the minds of people.

[river flowing] The 1830s were a time when doctors did not understand how cholera spread.

Local streams were used as dumping grounds for all forms of waste, including human waste.

In Lexington, Town Branch Creek, the city's main water source, became such a dumping ground.

When the first citizens fell victim to this disease, it quickly spread through the population.

[river flowing] During rainy seasons, cholera spread even quicker as the creek would overflow, pouring into water wells.

[birds chirping] One other factor promoted the spread of cholera.

[birds chirping] The pioneers who founded this city had gathered around McConnell Springs shortly after the Battle of Lexington at the start of the Revolutionary War.

These springs were part of an underground complex of subterranean caverns that spanned the city.

[birds chirping] McConnell Springs is an opening in a cave system.

Rain that falls on much of Lexington gets funneled into the subsurface that goes into that cave system and comes out at McConnell Springs.

[birds chirping] This cave system would allow infected waters to mix with the drinking water from underground wells.

The death toll rose quickly, and the number of bodies would overwhelm the ability to move and bury them.

It was a moment in time that called for a hero, and one man stepped forward.

William King Solomon was a digger, a man who made his living digging wells and cisterns and clearing dirt roads of rock and tree stumps.

Finding bodies wrapped in sheets throughout the city, Solomon, with strong arms and back, loaded them onto a wagon and hauled them to the cemetery on Third Street.

There, he would dig their graves.

King Solomon himself would not contract cholera.

One story many tell is that as he was known as the town's ne'er-do-well, it was his penchant for drinking alcohol rather than water that kept him from the disease.

The death toll in Lexington reached 500 out of a town of only 6,000.

There was a huge percentage of the population that was gone, and that included everyone from the landed gentry to the laborer to children to enslaved persons.

The disease had no bounds.

[birds chirping] The Third Street Cemetery would fill with graves to the point there was room for no more.

In 1849, Lexington Cemetery would open just outside the downtown area.

It was designed in the newer British style.

Rather than rows of tombstones, it featured trees and bush-lined walkways and cherry blossoms blooming in the spring.

And to this day, Lexington Cemetery is home to the remains of a Lexington hero.

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