The Project Gutenberg Etext of San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 by James B. Stetson

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg file.

Please do not remove this header information.

This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to view the eBook. Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information needed to understand what they may and may not do with the eBook. To encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end, rather than having it all here at the beginning.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get eBooks, and further information, is included below. We need your donations.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541 Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.

Title: San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906

Author: James B. Stetson

Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4640] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 20, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

The Project Gutenberg Etext of San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 by James B. Stetson ******This file should be named sfded10.txt or sfded10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, sfded11.txt VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, sfded10a.txt

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

The "legal small print" and other information about this book may now be found at the end of this file. Please read this important information, as it gives you specific rights and tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.

*** This etext was produced by David Schwan <davidsch@earthlink.net>.

San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906

Personal Recollections

By

James B. Stetson

These recollections were written in June, 1906, but the first edition being exhausted and a new one being required, I have included some events that occurred later, without changing the original date.

Personal Recollections During the Eventful Days of April, 1906

As the earthquake and the great fire in San Francisco in the year 1906 were events of such unusual interest, and realizing how faulty is man's memory after time passes, I have here jotted down a few incidents which I personally observed, and shall lay them away, so that if in the future I should desire I can refer to these notes, made while the events were new and fresh in my mind, with some assurance of their accuracy.

On the morning of April 18, 1906, at 5:13, in my residence, 1801 Van Ness Avenue, I was awakened by a very severe shock of earthquake. The shaking was so violent that it nearly threw me out of bed. It threw down a large bookcase in my chamber, broke the glass front, and smashed two chairs; another bookcase fell across the floor; the chandelier was so violently shaken that I thought it would be broken into pieces. The bric-a-brac was thrown from the mantel and tables, and strewed the floor with broken china and glass. It is said to have lasted fifty-eight seconds, but as nearly as I can estimate the violent part was only about twelve seconds.

As soon as it was over I got up and went to the window, and saw the air in the street filled with a white dust, which was caused by the falling of masonry from St. Luke's Church on the diagonal corner from my room. I waited for the dust to settle, and I then saw the damage which had been done to Claus Spreckels's house and the church. The chimneys of the Spreckels mansion were gone, the stone balustrade and carved work wrecked. The roof and the points of the gables and ornamental stone work of the church had fallen, covering the sidewalk and lying piled up against the sides of the building to the depth of eight or ten feet.