“I was asleep and was awakened by the house
rocking. With the exception of water in vases,
and milk in pans being spilled, and one of our chimneys
badly cracked, we escaped with nothing but a bad scare,
but I can assure you it was a terrific and terrifying
experience to feel that old house rocking, jolting
and jumping under us, with the most terrible roar,
dull, deep and nerve-racking. It calmed down after
that and we went back to bed, only to get up at six
o’clock to find that neighbors had suffered
by having vases knocked from tables, bric-a-brac knocked
around, tiles knocked out of grates and scarcely a
chimney left standing. We thought that we had
had the worst of it, so I started over to the city
as usual, reaching there about eight o’clock,
and it is just impossible to describe the scenes that
met my eyes.
“In every direction from the ferry building
flames were seething, and as I stood there, a five-story
building half a block away fell with a crash, and
the flames swept clear across Market Street and caught
a new fireproof building recently erected. The
streets in places had sunk three or four feet, in
others great humps had appeared four or five feet
high. The street car tracks were bent and twisted
out of shape. Electric wires lay in every direction.
Streets on all sides were filled with brick and mortar,
buildings either completely collapsed or brick fronts
had just dropped completely off. Wagons with horses
hitched to them, drivers and all, lying on the streets,
all dead, struck and killed by the falling bricks,
these mostly the wagons of the produce dealers, who
do the greater part of their work at that hour of the
morning. Warehouses and large wholesale houses
of all descriptions either down, or walls bulging,
or else twisted, buildings moved bodily two or three
feet out of a line and still standing with walls all
cracked.
“The Call building, a twelve-story skyscraper,
stood, and looked all right at first glance, but had
moved at the base two feet at one end out into the
sidewalk, and the elevators refused to work, all the
interior being just twisted out of shape. It
afterward burned as I watched it. I worked my
way in from the ferry, climbing over piles of brick
and mortar and keeping to the centre of the street
and avoiding live wires that lay around on every side,
trying to get to my office. I got within two
blocks of it and was stopped by the police on account
of falling walls. I saw that the block in which
I was located was on fire, and seemed doomed, so turned
back and went up into the city.
