The Grand Forks area saw a smallpox epidemic in the fall of 1878 that killed the city’s first physician. Few newspaper accounts exist about the outbreak, but one family’s history links the epidemic to a neighbor who knocked on the family’s door and collapsed unconscious onto their kitchen floor, bleeding from smallpox. Of the six people at home, three were sickened and died -- the father and two small daughters just days apart. Their bodies were placed in wooden coffins, sprinkled with lye and