Water for Schools
Menu

Worksheet Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics

Mapping the 1856 Cholera Outbreak in Ashendell

A grade 10 worksheet in which students plot four public pumps in a fictional mill town, compute case rates per 100 households, and weigh the evidence.

Objectives

  1. Students will plot water sources and industrial sites on a coordinate grid to reveal a spatial pattern.
  2. Students will calculate cholera case rates per 100 households and compare them across four districts.
  3. Students will explain what the workhouse data add to the case against one public pump.

Vocabulary

Key words: cholera, miasma, case rate, public pump, sanitary reform, spatial pattern, correlation

Teacher overview

Nineteenth-century cities suffered repeated cholera outbreaks, and for most of that century the leading medical explanation was foul air rising from waste and marshland. Mapping was what changed the argument, because a map could show that sickness clustered around a shared water source rather than spreading evenly through a bad-smelling district. This worksheet uses an invented outbreak in the fictional mill town of Ashendell in 1856 so that students do the reasoning themselves rather than reading its conclusion. The misconception worth naming for students is the belief that the link between contaminated water and disease was obvious to people at the time; in fact councils resisted closing wells, and it took spatial evidence and rate comparisons of the kind students build here to force the question. Cholera spreads through water tainted with human waste, so the dye works on the map matters only as a sign that surface drainage can reach the Vintry Street pump, not as the cause of the disease.

Mapping the 1856 Cholera Outbreak in Ashendell — Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Ashendell is a fictional mill town of about 4,000 people. In the summer of 1856 the town recorded a cholera outbreak over six weeks. Four public pumps supplied the town's households. The table below gives the location of each pump and of two other features, measured in blocks east and blocks north from the southwest corner of town. The River Ashen runs along the northern edge of town, at 7 blocks north.

Feature Blocks east Blocks north
Vintry Street pump 3 4
Ropewalk pump 6 2
Cobb Lane pump 1 2
Mill Head pump 5 6
Ashendell dye works 3 5
Town workhouse 4 4

The next table gives the households served by each pump and the cholera cases recorded among them during the six weeks.

Pump Households served Cholera cases
Vintry Street 240 84
Ropewalk 180 9
Cobb Lane 300 12
Mill Head 150 6

The town workhouse stands inside the Vintry Street district but draws its water from its own deep well. It housed 90 residents during the outbreak and recorded 2 cases.

  1. On graph paper, draw a grid 7 blocks wide and 7 blocks tall and plot the six features from the first table. Which pump lies closest to the dye works, and how many blocks apart are they?
  2. What was the case rate for the Vintry Street district, in cases per 100 households? Round to the nearest tenth.
  3. What was the case rate for the Ropewalk district, in cases per 100 households?
  4. What was the case rate for the Cobb Lane district, in cases per 100 households?
  5. What was the case rate for the Mill Head district, in cases per 100 households?
  6. Add the four districts together. What was the town-wide case rate, in cases per 100 households, to the nearest tenth?
  7. How many times higher was the Vintry Street rate than the Ropewalk rate?
  8. What was the case rate at the workhouse, in cases per 100 residents, to the nearest tenth?
  9. The workhouse sits in the middle of the worst-hit district but drew water from its own well. Explain what its case rate adds to the argument that the Vintry Street pump caused the outbreak.
  10. A councilor argues that the Vintry district is simply poorer and more crowded, and that crowding explains the deaths. State one piece of evidence Ashendell could collect that would help decide between the crowding explanation and the pump explanation.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: The Vintry Street pump, one block away. The dye works sits at 3 east and 5 north, and the Vintry Street pump sits at 3 east and 4 north, so they share a column and lie one block apart, which is closer than any other pump.
  2. Answer: 35.0 cases per 100 households. Dividing 84 cases by 240 households gives 0.35, and multiplying by 100 gives 35.0.
  3. Answer: 5.0 cases per 100 households. Dividing 9 cases by 180 households gives 0.05, and multiplying by 100 gives 5.0.
  4. Answer: 4.0 cases per 100 households. Dividing 12 cases by 300 households gives 0.04, and multiplying by 100 gives 4.0.
  5. Answer: 4.0 cases per 100 households. Dividing 6 cases by 150 households gives 0.04, and multiplying by 100 gives 4.0.
  6. Answer: 12.8 cases per 100 households. The four districts together had 111 cases among 870 households, and 111 divided by 870 is 0.1276, which is 12.8 cases per 100 households.
  7. Answer: 7 times. Dividing the Vintry rate of 35.0 by the Ropewalk rate of 5.0 gives 7.
  8. Answer: 2.2 cases per 100 residents. Dividing 2 cases by 90 residents gives 0.0222, which is 2.2 cases per 100 residents.
  9. Answer: It removes the neighborhood itself as the explanation. The workhouse residents breathed the same air, lived on the same streets, and were poorer and more crowded than most households in the district, yet their rate of 2.2 cases per 100 residents was well below the Vintry Street district, where 35.0 cases per 100 households still means several cases per 100 people even if each household held five or six people. The one thing that set them apart was their water source, so the difference points at the pump rather than at the district.
  10. Answer: Accept any evidence that separates water source from location. Strong answers include comparing households in the Vintry district that drew water from a different pump with neighbors who used Vintry Street, comparing crowding measures such as persons per room across all four districts, tracking whether cases fell after the pump handle was removed, or testing whether waste from nearby privies, cesspools, or the dye works drains seeps into the pump's shallow water.

Differentiation

Support

Provide the grid already drawn with the axes labeled and the two tables reprinted beside it, and complete question 2 with the class so students have a model of the case-rate calculation. Allow rates to be rounded to the nearest whole number.

Extension

Ask students to write the two-paragraph report a town medical officer would submit to the council, stating the recommendation, the strongest evidence for it, and the strongest objection a council member could raise. Require the report to acknowledge that the data show an association rather than a proven cause.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "pump," "case rate," "workhouse," and "district" with a labeled sketch of a street with a public pump at the corner. Provide a filled example of one rate calculation with each step named, and offer sentence frames for questions 9 and 10, such as "The workhouse matters because ___."