Nothing can prepare you for it; sifting through the ash and broken bits of what’s left of your life. Or so I’ve been told. Like all types of loss, it’s inconceivable to someone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand. I can understand it in the abstract, certainly. I can get shivers about the mere thought of losing everything to fire, of having everything taken from me — my stuff, yes, but also my memories, my sense of security, my home. But then I can shake off the nightmare and continue about my day. That’s not the case for those whose entire existence now revolves around the worst day of their lives. They wake up in a home not their own, and spend the day on the phone with a carnival show of insurance companies, federal and state relief workers and now contractors. And all the while, their children start school once more. Groceries have to be bought, dinners made and laundry cleaned.
Life has a terrible way of moving forward despite yours coming to a complete stop.
Shortly before the Valley Fire ravaged the Cobb and Middletown area, I came across a curious object in the Historic Courthouse Museum: a partially burned, leather-bound guest registry book. In light of events that followed, this burnt and water-stained volume told a story all too familiar. From its age-stained pages we go back to turn-of-the-century San Francisco, on a day of death and destruction that cemented itself into the memory of California.
The hub of business, trade and culture in California and home to some 400,000 people, by 1906 San Francisco was the 9th largest city in the U.S. and the jewel of the west coast. The city itself was a microcosm of the larger social makeup of the new-century America. Home to businessmen like Mark Hopkins and Leland Sanford — two of the “Big Four” industrial barons who had amassed fortunes during the previous decades — and newly immigrated families from Europe (one in three residents of the city were foreign-born), citizens of San Francisco ran the gamut of extraordinarily wealthy to utterly impoverished. The urban fabric of the city reflected this disparity, with blocks of stately hotels and office buildings cheek by jowl with wood tenements and shanties. It was a city of longshoremen and lawyers; prostitutes and politicians; Marxists and merchants; poets, artists, drunkards, dimwits and dandies. In short: the epitome of urban America at the turn of the century.
Over the previous decades the city had sprouted stone and cement edifices like the Call Building, San Francisco’s first sky-scraper. To serve tourists and visiting businessmen, hotels were also built like the six-story Winchester Hotel down the street from the Call. Like today, guests to the Winchester would sign the leather-bound registry book at the reception desk before being shown to their rooms overlooking Third and Stevenson streets. We know that about a dozen new guests arrived at the Winchester on Sunday April 17, 1906 — the last page to be used in the guest registry, which now resides in the Historic Courthouse Museum as a fragile artifact of the horrible events that followed.
You see, early the next morning, the guests’ world came to an end.
The earthquake announced itself with a shockwave at 5:13 a.m. that was felt from Coos, Oregon in the north to Los Angeles in the South and Nevada in the east — an area of about 375,000 square miles. It rent buildings from their foundations and collapsed walls into streets. By 6:30 a.m. troops stationed at the nearby Presidio were ordered into the city. The initial reaction of those residents unharmed was relief at being spared. At 8:14 a.m. a major aftershock finished what the initial quake started, toppling those buildings just barely standing. Although the damage was severe, it would pale in comparison to the fire that raged shortly thereafter.
The first fire started almost immediately, the second quickly followed suit sometime after 10:30 — later called the “Ham and Egg” fire because it was believed to have started from an untended breakfast left on a stove. Sometime in the mid-morning, the Winchester hotel caught fire. At 11 a.m., weakened by the furious onslaught of flames, the hotel collapsed in a heap of broken brick and flaming beams. Somewhere deep within the rubble lay the singed guest registry.
The first-hand accounts of residents fleeing their homes could have come from modern-day residents of southern Lake County for the identical manner in which they described the insatiable fire. DeWitt C. Baldwin, an 8 year old at the time, sums up his experience:
“Two lasting impressions were imbedded in my mind … I saw a powerful blaze consuming everything before it. I begun [sic] to think of the destructive power of fire and realized that fire was more destructive of man and his environment than any cause I had known then. Later that day when we were ordered to leave our houses to find places of refuge somewhere on the hills so the authorities could better handle the spreading menace, I began to realize as never before the importance of food, shelter and protection.”
The fires raged for days. At the end of the disaster, over half of the population of the city found themselves homeless. The financial cost of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and subsequent fire were unprecedented, the human cost somewhere around 3,000 dead. At some point, a passerby or fireman pulled the buried guest registry from the rubble of the Winchester Hotel and, sometime in the seven decades that followed, it made its way to Lake County.
Visiting San Francisco today, you would never know of the sheer destruction that was visited upon the city. It took years but the scar left by the fire healed, buildings rebuilt, people repopulated. But as young Baldwin’s testimony attests — related over 80 years after the event — these disasters have a way of marking those who experience them. As a community we are still in the immediate aftermath of our own Great Fire, the pain is too fresh. But perhaps we can take solace in a fragile, singed book and the now vibrant city from whose ruins it was rescued. Although the scars may remain, time has a — perhaps not so — horrible habit of moving forward.
Tony Pierucci is Curator of Lake County Museums
