Between Two Rivers · Episode 8
The Earthquake
August 31, 1886: the biggest earthquake in the history of the Southeast shakes Charleston for less than a minute. Falling chimneys and fires in the dark, a city cut off from the world, weeks in tent cities, St. Michael's steeple, the first great American earthquake study, and the iron earthquake bolts that still hold the old houses together.
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Carol Tuesday night, August 31st, 1886. A hot, still evening in Charleston. Ten minutes before ten o'clock.
Shannon People are sitting on their piazzas, trying to catch a breeze. Some are already in bed.
Carol And then they hear it. A low roar, like a train coming, getting louder and louder.
Shannon And the ground starts to move.
Carol Welcome back to Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time.
Shannon Last time, Charleston climbed out of the ruins of the war, found a fortune in phosphate, and then got hit by the cyclone of 1885. This time, almost exactly a year later, something much worse.
Carol Episode eight. The Earthquake.
Shannon The shaking lasted less than a minute. The worst of it, maybe forty-five seconds.
Carol That doesn't sound long.
Shannon It's forever, when the ground is moving. Walls cracked open. Chimneys snapped off and crashed through roofs. Brick fronts peeled away from houses and fell into the street.
Carol In the dark.
Shannon In the dark. Fires broke out in several parts of town. People ran out into the streets in their nightclothes, and the streets were the most dangerous place to be, because that's where the bricks were falling.
Carol How strong was it?
Shannon Scientists today think it was around magnitude seven. It's the biggest earthquake in the history of the southeastern United States. People felt it as far away as Boston, Chicago, and Cuba.
Carol Where was the center of it?
Shannon Not in the city itself. It was out to the northwest, around the area near Summerville and the Ashley River, maybe fifteen or twenty miles away.
Carol So what did people do?
Shannon They got out of their houses and stayed out. There were more shocks through the night, aftershocks, and every time the ground moved again, people screamed and prayed.
Carol Did they know what it was?
Shannon Some did. But earthquakes weren't something anyone in Charleston expected. A lot of people thought it was the end of the world.
Carol And the fires?
Shannon The fire department, the one Mayor Courtenay had built up a few years earlier, went to work in the middle of all of it. And the mayor wasn't even home. He was on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. They kept the fires from spreading. If they hadn't, the whole city might have burned.
Carol How many people died?
Shannon At least sixty, in the city and nearby, and some counts run higher. Some were killed right away by falling bricks. Others died later of their injuries.
Carol And the rest of the country didn't know.
Shannon Not at first. The telegraph lines were down. Railroad tracks outside the city were twisted and bent. A train coming in that night actually ran off the rails.
Carol So how did the news get out?
Shannon Little by little. By the next day, word reached the newspapers in the North. And the headlines said Charleston was in ruins.
Carol Again.
Shannon Again. After the war, after the cyclone, and now this.
Carol So what did Charleston look like the next morning?
Shannon People came out to find that almost every building in the city was damaged. Thousands of chimneys down. Walls cracked. Some houses were too dangerous to go back into.
Carol So where did they sleep?
Shannon Outside. For weeks. Families set up tents and lean-tos in every open space they could find. Marion Square. Washington Square. Down along the Battery.
Carol The Battery again.
Shannon The Battery again. The parks turned into tent cities. People cooked outside, slept outside, and waited for the aftershocks to stop.
Carol Did they stop?
Shannon Eventually. But there were small shocks for months afterward. Nobody trusted the ground for a long time.
Carol And what about St. Michael's? That steeple's been through everything.
Shannon It went through this too. The tower cracked, and the whole steeple sank about eight inches. But it stayed up.
Carol Of course it did.
Shannon Of course it did. And while Charleston was cleaning up, scientists came down from Washington to study what had happened. A geologist named Clarence Dutton led the work, and he wrote a huge report on it.
Carol Why does that matter?
Shannon It was one of the first big scientific studies of an earthquake in the United States. They mapped the shaking, collected people's accounts, and studied the little craters that had opened up out in the countryside, where sand and water had bubbled up out of the ground.
Carol Sand and water coming up out of the ground. That's eerie.
Shannon Very eerie. Scientists still find traces of them today, buried under the ground, when they dig down to look.
Carol So the city rebuilt. Again.
Shannon Again. Money came in from all over the country to help. And a lot of houses got a new feature.
Carol The earthquake bolts.
Shannon The earthquake bolts. If you walk around downtown Charleston, you'll see them on old brick houses. A round iron plate, or a star, or an S shape, on the outside wall.
Carol I always thought those were decorations.
Shannon That's what most people think. But behind each one is a long iron rod that runs right through the house, from one wall to the other. You tighten the bolt, and it pulls the walls together and holds them.
Carol So it's like a belt around the house.
Shannon That's a good way to put it. Some houses already had them before 1886. But after the earthquake, a lot more went in. And they're still there, holding the old walls together.
Carol So, if you're in Charleston today, where do you find this episode?
Shannon Look up. Walk south of Broad Street, along Church Street, or Tradd, or Meeting, and count the earthquake bolts on the brick houses. Once you start seeing them, you can't stop.
Carol Then stop by St. Michael's, at Broad and Meeting. That steeple has been through fire, war, a cyclone, and an earthquake, and it's still standing.
Shannon And if you drive out along the Ashley River, to Middleton Place, look at the ruins there. The main house had already been burned during the war, and the earthquake brought down much of what was left.
Carol That's the great Charleston earthquake. Less than a minute of shaking, weeks of sleeping in the parks, and iron bolts that still hold the city together.
Shannon And a city that, once again, refused to give up.
Carol Next time, it's the twentieth century. Charleston gets a famous dance, a woman who starts saving old houses one at a time, and the first historic district in America protected by law.
Shannon Saving Charleston. That's next time, on Between Two Rivers.