As the news filled up with stories about the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders were issued, Karen Lougheed knew she had seen all this mentioned before. About 15 years ago, the Winter Garden resident had come into possession of some letters written by her grandfather, Crawford Scott. “I thought, wasn’t there something about the Spanish Flu in there?” she said.
A Pittsburgh native, Scott had been drafted after a college deferment to fight in World War I. In October 1918, the peak of the H1N1 outbreak, the young soldier was sent to Fort Thomas in Kentucky to be processed and sent to war.