We have presented results that are informative with regard to the dynamics of the 1918 influenza pandemic in different populations and provide insight into two methodologies for estimating basic epidemiological parameters. Both methods assume that the population is closed, there are no missing cases and no migration to or from the population. The second of these assumptions is clearly violated with the data from Maryland; however the results appear to be reasonably robust to this discrepancy, except in the case of Cumberland. The purpose of this exercise determines to some extent which methodological approach we might favor. If the intent is to simply estimate the parameters for a specific epidemic and better understand what exactly was occurring in that setting, then the method presented by [12] (Garske et al.) appears to provide good fit. The caveat that we see in this method is that by estimating the effective reproductive number with the methodology of [7] (WT) there is an over fit of this parameter and it essentially traces the epidemic curve, lagged by the mean of the serial interval. It is not clear if this is a desirable or informative property. The MLE method has greater promise for generalizeability. While it can be argued that adhering to a parametric definition of the shape of the effective reproductive number leads to a greater chance of lack of fit, it can also lead to a result that can be interpretable for other settings that are similar to that being studied.