and it starts...

With the happy couple living together in Lynn, there was little need to write each other. We see no more letters until this missive, assumed to be from July or August 1910, since George labelled it with "written when Marian was first taken sick":
 
My dear George
I have just finished a letter to Marian and will enclose it in this so you can take it Friday. Read it over to be sure it is all right. Your ?special? came about half past nine and I was so glad to get it. My heart aches for you my boy - and my comfort is to do all I can for you. If it was not for earning the money to help you I should give up and come up to take care of you and do all I could for Marian. I am very proud of you both and I do believe Marian is going to get well and be a comparatively strong woman. I am so glad she has such a nice nurse - sometimes I mu-- see her.

Your letter touched me deeply. Do you know how nearly you are repeating Pop's experience only he had no one to help him as you have. But I firmly believe Marian will get well I think so more as her condition may account for much of this. I am to nervous to write a letter but you will read my love and sympathy between the lines.
Baby is beautiful and I think Ella takes nice care of him. She needs his crib and when I come we will send it up with his high chair and some clothes for cooler weather. Send me just a card every day. I will see about the gloves? in a little while - I can't just now. Don't worry - keep up your courage. I am always back of you. I wish Papa was here to help us. Many many thanks for the long beautiful letter - I shall write again very soon.
?Oceans? of love, Mother.

 

Consumption!

Yes, before their second anniversary, Marion took ill. Typical symptoms for her illness included a chronic cough (sometimes coughing up blood), night sweats, and weight loss. The weight loss in many patients - where it seemed the disease was eating the body up - caused people to call the sickness 'consumption'.
 
Today we call it tuberculosis.
 
The disease ran rampant in the 19th and early 20th century, before antibiotics. One reports says that 110,000 Americans died of it annually in the first decades of the 1900s.
 
Edward Trudeau, who contracted tuberculosis in the mid-19th century, believed he cured himself via an extended escape to the mountains in the 1870s. Thus he established a sanatorium in NY for other sufferers, where he prescribed "the same regime of healthy eating and outdoor living that had resulted in his own recovery, requiring residents to spend daylight hours outside riding horseback, walking, or reclining on the broad porches that encircled each of the sanatorium’s “cure cottages.” Trudeau also required his patients to eat several large meals a day, including at least three glasses of milk, and maintained a strict code of personal behavior that prohibited drinking, smoking, and cursing, and enforced a dress code." (Trudeau eventually died of TB in 1916.)
 
By 1910s, sanatoria had sprung up in states throughout the country. A Massachusetts State Sanatorium (originally called 'The Massachusetts Hospital for Consumptives and Tubercular Patients') opened in 1899 in Rutland MA. According to the Tuberculosis Directory, this hospital was:
"For early cases of pulmonary tuberculosis; patients must be citizens of the United States not too far advanced to admit of reasonable hope of radical improvement. Capacity: — 350. Rates:— S4. 00 per week; indigent cases treated at town or state expense. There are no free beds, but in many cases the bills are paid by cities or charitable organizations. Superintendent: — Dr. P. Charles Bartlett. Application may be made to any registered physician in the State of Massachusetts."

(Recent photos of the long-abandoned facilty can be seen here.)
 
We do not know if Marion actually went to the State Sanatorium, or to one of the seven other sanatoria that sprung up in Rutland, but we know she initially went to Rutland to fight her disease. Rutland is about 70 miles west of Lynn, which today is an 'easy' drive of 90 minutes; but in 1910 not everyone had autos - and the roads between towns left much to be desired. Thus, when George travelled to Rutland to visit his wife, he had to take the train.
 
As mentioned in Louisa's letter above, this must have felt like a family curse. Nearly 40 years earlier, George's father lost his first wife while his first son was under two years old.
 
The story continues here. Here is the previous page.

References

Source material for the above

• Letters handed down to James Gorham Armstead
• The Sanatorium Movement in America
• A tuberculosis directory : containing a list of institutions, associations, and other agencies dealing with tuberculosis in the United States and Canada (1911)