”
I could tell you about it all night and all day but you couldn’t
begin to realize what it was like unless you had been there.
”
“I could tell you about it all night and all day but you couldn’t begin to realize what it was like unless you had been there.”
Chester Lincoln, a business executive of Los Angeles, was describing the Great San Francisco Earthquake of April 18, 1906 to colleagues on its 54th anniversary. He was a boy of 11 when he had been thrown out of bed by its convulsions that morning, and had run into the street for safety.
“There was no safety,” he commented. “The ground was shaking like a blanket being snapped by a housewife and people were running and screaming. Most folks were still in their nightclothes and one man was running with only a blanket around him. The ground itself opened up, and I was in a panic looking for my parents and younger brother.”
Soon after, fires broke out from burst gas mains and quickly spread. By nightfall, young Lincoln had made his way to a hilltop with hundreds of other refugees. “We sat there looking down into the city and counted hundreds of fires before we gave it up,” he said. “Some people prayed on their knees because they thought Judgment Day had come.”
Lincoln found his mother and brother two days later, and his father shortly after.
His was the first eyewitness account I had ever heard. A few months later I began my career as a newsman.
Over the years I heard more first-hand accounts, including those of people who had lost family members to it. But I thought of it as strictly a San Francisco catastrophe until I came to Hollister.
Charlie Turner reminisced about that morning. He was a teenager in the Soap Lake area, and was milking cows. “The first sign something horrible was going to happen was when the cow leaped up and a horse in a nearby stall started kicking, then the whole earth rolled,” he said. He looked around to see no women were within hearing, and added, “It knocked me on my fanny. I ran outside and the trees, buildings, everything was jumping up and down. I thought the sky was going to fall.
Louise Perry of San Juan Bautista said, “It woke me up and I ran to the window to hold onto the sill with both hands, and the bushes and trees were quaking like they were alive, and I screamed for my mother. The aftershocks were nearly as bad and they just kept coming.”
John Weiss recounted years later, “We weren’t sure if the earth was going to open up and swallow us. Downtown was a mess. A whole row of businesses on the east side of San Benito Street between Fourth and Fifth was in ruins. We didn’t know how many people were dead. Most people were white-faced like ghosts from the plaster dust. Some women and a few kids were paralyzed from fear and sat in the street and screamed each time another shock hit.”
George Kincaid of Tres Pinos, who died last May less than six months before his 100th birthday, said, “I was five months old, too young to remember it, but Mother later told me how she grabbed me and ran and Dad hurried the other four kids outside. Years later they recalled how the northern sky glowed red from the fires in San Francisco.”
It claimed three lives here. One was a young woman, struck by a falling girder as she ran down the stairs. Another person died from injuries the following day. The third was not known until a week later when passers-by in the south county inspected a damaged cabin at the base of a hill. The earthquake had dislodged a boulder on the hillside, which crashed through the roof and crushed the lone occupant while he slept.
Almost before the dust settled, people were helping others who needed it, and soon rebuilding began. Within months most of the marks of the disaster were erased, except for a few cracked sidewalks and a pile of bricks that cascaded down from Mission San Juan Bautista and remained for more than 70 years.
