One Lawrence County family came to the brink of disaster–but were saved by the generosity of their neighbors.

The unthinkable happened to the young family of Frank and Ada Crane of Henryville on June 21, 1905. That morning, Ada sent their two sons, six-year-old Clyde and four-year-old Ellis on an errand to Patterson’s General Store. Along the way, the boys were attacked by a rabid dog. The animal was vicious; and bit the boys repeatedly on their arms and backs. When Ada heard their cries, she managed to beat the dog away from the children.

Rabies was a potentially fatal disease in those days. Frank and Ada had to act fast. They immediately left for Columbia, to find someone to apply a madstone to the boys’ injuries. Madstones are stones found in the stomachs of cud-chewing animals which were applied to bites or wounds in hopes of drawing the poison out of the wound.

The next day, the Cranes found someone with a madstone in Columbia, but, according to the Columbia ‘Herald and Mail,’ the stone was “applied with poor results, as it would adhere to any part of the body, and even to a person who had not been bitten.” A Columbia physician recommended that the boys be sent to the Pasteur Clinic in New York City as he knew “the cure there to be a certain one.”

The problem was that the Cranes had no money for a trip to New York. Not long before the dog attack, the family lost almost everything they had in a house fire. When news of their plight spread, donations began to pour in from Henryville and Columbia. Within days, a fund of $200 was raised to get the boys to New York.

The first successful human rabies vaccine was administered by Louis Pasteur in 1885 in France. The Pasteur Institute of New York City was founded in 1895 by a bacteriologist who studied Pasteur’s methods. Frank accompanied the boys to the clinic, where they received care free of charge for eighteen days.

After the boys were successfully treated, the Cranes returned to Henryville. Newspaper accounts say that the boys “would have certainly developed hydrophobia had they not gone to New York for treatment.”