The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was a disaster which befell the city of San Francisco in California in the United States on the 18th of April 1906. The earthquake began off the north coast of California early that morning and is believed to have been nearly an eight magnitude earthquake. What made the earthquake especially devastating when it hit San Francisco was that the disturbance caused by it led to the outbreak of a devastating fire. In the hours that followed upwards of 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed and or badly damaged and approximately 3,000 people died. It remains one of the largest natural disasters in American history. The city though recovered quite quickly and was booming again by the 1910s.[1]
1906 San Francisco earthquake chronology of events
Of all the parts of the American West California experienced the greatest level of settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were multiple reasons for this. Spanish and Mexican settlement had been more substantial here prior to the annexation of the region by the United States in 1848 than had been the case with other regions such as Arizona and New Mexico which were also taken over by the US at this time. Then a gold rush began in the late 1840s, one which brought tens of thousands of settlers to California by sea and land. Finally, oil rushes began in the 1870s, while the state’s position on the West Coast also made it the center of the growing Pacific trade of the United States. San Francisco was already a town of several hundred people at the end of Mexican rule, but as the gold and oil rushes occurred it drew tens of thousands of settlers. By the end of the nineteenth century well over 300,000 people lived in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area.[2]
On the 18th of April 1906 the city’s growth in recent decades would make it the epicenter of the damage inflicted by an earthquake which struck off the coast of California just after 5am that morning. This was an age before systems were in place to monitor earthquakes and there is no scientific recording of the strength of it, but scientists believe it measured around 7.9 magnitude, with some arguing for a strength as high as 8.3, making it an extreme earthquake. It was felt as far inland as Nevada and well to the north in parts of Oregon. Scientists and historians have recently begun to speculate that earthquakes like this which struck California in the first half of the twentieth century may have been the result of the intense oil rush from the 1870s onwards and the increasingly intense drilling associated with it.[3]
Much like the 1755 Lisbon great earthquake and tsunami, the greater part of the damage which was inflicted on San Francisco in the 24 hours that followed was not the result of the initial earthquake and aftershocks. Instead roughly 90% of the damage was caused by fires which were started as a result of the tremors and which then burned out of control for hours and in some instances days to come. Some were caused by human error as the fire department attempted to destroy buildings with dynamite to stop the spread of the fires and made the situation worse in the process. As a result of these combined effects an estimated 80% of the city was destroyed, causing upwards of ten billion dollars’ worth of damage in today’s money. This constituted about 1% of GNP in the US at the time and is now understood to have contributed to the financial crisis of 1907.[4] The death toll was initially believed to be in the hundreds. Today though it is believed to have been closer to 3,000 people. Some of the initial underreporting was due to the fact that the highest levels of mortality were seen in San Francisco’s Chinatown, which was densely populated and where fire hazards abounded.[5]
Extent of migration after the San Francisco earthquake
The earthquake and fire destroyed huge portions of San Francisco and left roughly 3,000 people dead and tens of thousands more homeless. On the surface of it, this would seem like an outcome which should have stunted the growth of San Francisco and the wider Bay Area for years to come, but this was not the case, in part because the municipal government downplayed the severity of the disaster in the immediate aftermath of it. New settlers continued to arrive and an intense reconstruction project ensured that there was no shortage of jobs. As a result, San Francisco experienced net inward migration in the second half of the 1900s, an outcome which mirrored the experience of Chicago in the aftermath of the great fire of 1871 and the destruction of Johnstown in Pennsylvania in a major flood in 1889.[6]
Demographic impact of the San Francisco earthquake
The demographic impact, as noted, was somewhat negligible. San Francisco, like all American cities in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, had been experiencing substantial growth prior to the earthquake. From a population of 150,000 in the city and wider Bay Area in 1870 it had swelled to 298,000 in 1890 and then to 342,000 in 1900. The earthquake and fire did little to stem this growth. In 1910, four years after the disaster, the Bay Area population had grown yet again, standing at 416,000. By 1920 it had exceeded half a million.[7] The newcomers continued to be an eclectic mix of people who had been born in the United States along with immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany and other parts of Europe experiencing significant emigration at the time, while some Japanese from across the Pacific were also involved.[8]
While San Francisco’s population recovered and then grew on its pre-earthquake population within a few years, it has been posited that the quake led to a population boom to the south in Los Angeles. The City of Angels was a growing urban center of 100,000 at the turn of the century, but it still stood in the shadow of San Francisco in 1900. By way of contrast, by 1910 its population had swelled to 320,000. Many of those who arrived there in the late 1900s would doubtlessly have gravitated towards San Francisco had it not been for the destruction of the city in 1906. By 1920 Los Angeles’s population was closing on 580,000 people, overtaking that of San Francisco for the first time.[9]
Explore more about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
- California, San Francisco Area Funeral Home Records, 1835-1931 record collection on MyHeritage
- California Passenger Lists, 1893-1957 record collection on MyHeritage
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1791-1963 record collection on MyHeritage
- Researching in California – Libraries, Archives and Online at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Society Spotlight: California Genealogical Society at the MyHeritage blog
References
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/natural-disasters-and-environment/1906-san-francisco-earthquake
- ↑ Susan Craddock, ‘Tuberculosis, Tenements and the Epistemology of Neglect: San Francisco in the Nineteenth Century’, in Ecumene, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1998), pp. 53–80.
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/02/oil-drilling-caused-killer-earthquake-in-boomtime-california-scientists-suspect
- ↑ Kerry A. Odell and Marc D. Weidenmier, ‘Real Shock, Monetary Aftershock: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the Panic of 1907’, in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 1002–1027.
- ↑ https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/events/1906calif/18april/
- ↑ https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/1906-san-francisco-earthquake-and-fire-relief-and-reconstruction/
- ↑ http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty40.htm
- ↑ https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/18/san-francisco-japantown-first-westfield-shopping-mall/
- ↑ http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php