It was also during this year that a night watch was established, who were paid by a subscription of the citizens and not from the treasury of the town. B. Morgan, C. Sly and M. Woolston were the first persons elected to this office. 1822--The first event of the next year was the authorization by the Trustees of the issue of town notes, varying in denomination from twelve and a half cents to one dollar, the aggregate value of all of which was not to exceed four thousand dollars. These notes, however, did not meet with the usual fate of the shinplaster currency, for in about a year afterward we find an order of the Trustees for counting and destroying them, leaving the impression either that they were not put into circulation or were redeemed and so withdrawn from a market already glutted with such trash. It was during the year 1822 that the town was visited by a dreadful epidemic. Dr. John P. Harrison, late of Cincinnati and formerly of this city, a physician of distinguished ability, has published a minute and highly valuable account of this epidemic in the Philadelphia Medical Journal, Vol. 8. The disease was a highly aggravated bilious fever, so terrible as to deserve the dreaded name of yellow fever. The mortality was very great and the alarm existing on account of it throughout the whole interior of the neighboring States was of the most exciting character. The season was an unhealthy one throughout the West, but the scourge fell most heavily upon Louisville, probably on account of the miasma from her many ponds. The scourge here, as Dr. Drake says in his valuable history of the diseases of the Valley of North America, amounted almost to depopulation. The Trustees were by it awakened from their lethargy. A Board of Health, consisting of Drs. Gait, Smith, Harrison, Wilson and Tompkins, were appointed to examine into the causes of disease and report the same to the Trustees, together with the mode or practicability of removing the same. This first Board of Health was appointed too late. Had they been ordered to examine into this matter years before, much might have been effected, but the time for such action was now passed, and this fearful malady, now inevitable, became the most terrible blow ever given to the prosperity of the rising town. The news spread far and wide, and the neighboring towns, instead of seeking to publish only the truth, assisted largely in circulating garbled intelligence and extravagant reports of a fact which tended to their advantage by destroying the fair fame of their rival. Emigrants from abroad as well as from this and neighboring States, for years afterward, dreaded even to pass through the town, and of those who had already determined to locate here, many were dissuaded from their purpose by the assertion that it was but rushing upon death to make the attempt. This occurred, too, just at a period when the resources of the town, beginning to develop themselves, were attracting the attention of capitalists.