More than 100 years separates the COVID-19 pandemic and the influenza pandemic that swept the globe starting in 1918.

Dolores Samons Harvell, who recently moved from Melbourne, Fla., to the Northwest, said her family has a special link that ties them from that period to now. 

During this pandemic, Harvell was inspired to write the story of her family from that bygone pandemic in a book titled Employee U.S.A. She said it was important to share the perspective of her grandparents, the Kivetts, as well as her mother and aunts because they witnessed the origins of what was then called Camp Bragg.

They were also able to pass down the history of the Puerto Rican men who helped forge what would become the largest U.S. military base by population.

Harvell said her mother first brought her to the land that used to be the family farm when she was just 8 years old.

“So, within eight years of age, I first became introduced to it," she said. "I didn't quite understand the story at that time. I think I felt an emotion."

She said that later manifested as anger when she learned about how some Puerto Ricans described their experience there.

In the late spring of 1918, the U.S. Department of Labor began recruiting Puerto Rican laborers in an effort to ease labor shortages. 

At the same time, the U.S. Department of War (created in 1789 and became the Department of the Army via the National Security Act of 1947) was looking for suitable land for a field artillery training center. 

“It wasn’t densely populated just because of the nature of the sand hills. It had existing roads, it had existing railways and it had the kind of landscape that would be suitable for field artillery training, which means it’s not a high elevation,” said Dr. Linda Carnes-McNaughton, the archeologist and curator with Fort Bragg’s Cultural Resources Program.

Many of the nearly 1,400 Puerto Rican men who came to work on the camp arrived without clothing that was suitable for the fall climate in North Carolina, especially compared to the weather back home.

Carnes-McNaughton noted that the camp was segregated for white workers, Black workers and Puerto Rican/Cuban workers. She said they were paid 35 cents per hour. According to a 1921 copy of the Journal of Political Economy, digitally published by JSTOR, the average hourly wage between 1918 and 1919 was 56.1 cents.

But it wasn’t just low wages that these men were dealing with. According to a 1918 deposition given by Rafael Marchán, they were subjected to racism, threats of violence and sometimes beatings. It noted in part:

“…Even the Fire Chief, who evidently is a regular bully at the Camp has gone so far outside the scope of his authority at different occasions that the men under him are wont to look upon him as the terror of the place, the bulldog of the Camp, who has no hesitation in striking men with his fist or brandish his revolver in their faces; and the affiant further says that the acts of cruelty committed daily against these men are too numerous to be cited here in all their repulsive and disgusting details...”

“It was just inhumane, harsh, cruel. It made me angry,” Harvell said. “And what really makes me angry, there are mass graves, at least one that my mother’s spoken to that she and her mother witnessed.” 

Part of the former Kivett farm, known as Mont View, was used as a potter’s field or a basic cemetery space, which eventually was named Fort Bragg Main Post Cemetery. Carnes-McNaughton said she and others at Fort Bragg don’t doubt that seeing men being buried on their property was traumatic for the Kivett family, but said they don’t have evidence of a mass grave on site.

She said from the first death in the midst of the facility construction on October 12, 1918 to mid-spring, there were 49 people who died and were buried on property. Of those, 39 were Puerto Rican and Cuban, 33 had a cause of death linked with pandemic of the time.

“These are people who gave their lives to build Camp Bragg. They sacrificed their life,” Carnes-McNaughton noted.

She added that Black and white laborers who died would’ve more likely been taken back to where they were from to be buried instead of at Camp Bragg.

Most of the Puerto Rican men left before U.S. troops began to be stationed at Camp Bragg in February 1919. Through efforts by those like Harvell and Fort Bragg historians, the memories of those who helped make the camp what it became is being held up for visitors and those curious about the history. 

Jessica Muñiz, a history major at University of North Carolina at Pembroke, is working on learning more about not only the Puerto Rican men who worked at Camp Bragg, but the thousands of others who were brought to the mainland U.S. around that time.

Her father, Carlos Muñiz, a Puerto Rican man and a retired soldier who served from 1997 through 2020 and was stationed at Fort Bragg, said he is proud of his daughter for continuing some of the research that Harvell started.

“I think it would be good to put that story out because maybe some people in Puerto Rico, maybe they don’t even know what happened [to their family member],” Muñiz said.

“I think this story will clearly grow. I think recognition grows every day,” Carnes-McNaughton said. “I fully anticipate after this story and some of the others, that there’ll be more younng scholars out there reaching out to come and see what records we can share with them. And we’re more than happy to do that.”

Harvell said that’s her main goal: to make sure that the work of these men and the sacrifices of their families are not forgotten. 

“This is an unknown. It's one of those 'under the rug' things. And I've got a vacuum trying to blow it out,” Harvell said.