Santa Rosa's Sad Story

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jun 27, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 25.

Santa Rosa's Sad Story

THE city of Santa Rosa, county seat of Sonoma County, Cal., with a population of 10,000, has a thrilling earthquake story which we barely noted in our first edition. In some respects this place fared worse than San Francisco in proportion to size. This is especially true of its death-roll, which reached 102. From Mr. Geo. E. Peery's graphic report to the Oakland Herald, we take the following:

The appalling immensity of San Francisco's catastrophe obscured Santa Rosa's sorrow from the world's attention. Tho less in extent, it was greater in degree than that of the metropolis. The loss of life was proportionately greater, and the business part of town was absolutely annihilated. Santa Rosa differed from most towns of similar size in being more compactly built. All its business houses were closely grouped about the center, where stood the county courthouse. So, when this group of business blocks was tumbled into blazing ruin, there were no suburban stores to supply the pressing needs of the moment.

There was neither bread nor meat for the living; there were no coffins for the dead. The breaking off of communication left the world in ignorance of Santa Rosa's destruction; and beyond mere surmises, this city's first intimation of San Francisco's disaster was the arrival of a train load of nearly a thousand refugees, wounded, sick, half-clad, and half-starved, seeking shelter where there were no houses, and begging help that none could give.

San Francisco's call for aid was heard far and wide, and spendthrift hands responded, but Santa Rosa's moaning reached only her own ears at first, and the suffering was intensified as it lengthened.

The earthquake shock buried firemen, horses, and engines under their own walls and roofs. Frantic efforts freed them, and valiantly they served. Santa Rosa had two engines; Sabastopol sent a third. The water system was unimpaired, and the supply sufficient, and within three hours the three engines had twenty scattered fires under control. Just how many lives those three hours cost can not be told. Many of the corpses found in the ruins had been crushed when the buildings fell; but many others had been living survivors of the earthquake until the fire reached them.

In the office of the Press-Democrat newspaper, four lives were lost. Three carriers, with the pressman, were crushed to a pulp when the three-story building slid backward with its thousand-ton weight upon the one-story pressroom.

The Hotel St. Rose was a new building, four stories high, and believed to be of modern scientific construction. It crumpled as a pasteboard box, imprisoning some of the hundred guests within its walls, and sliding others outward into the street unhurt. It required hours to free some of those shut in.

The courthouse lies a mighty heap of ruin, its massive dome sunk nearly out of sight, with its summit resting against the eastern wall, which bulges with the weight. The new Masonic Temple, in which the mortar on the topmost course of yellow stone was scarcely dry, now lies as tho battered by a month's bombardment. One block east is a heap of blue basalt, that a week ago was the public library. The earthquake's vibrant swing flung blocks of stone that weighed a quarter of a ton apiece across the street.

Five banks with deposits aggregating nearly nine million dollars, were in the earthquake's path. Now, five naked steel vaults, loom among a chaos of shattered walls, guarded by sentinels with rifles. Three brick hotels, three and four stories high, one hotel of stone, and two that were built of wood, are all laid low by earthquake shock and fire. The big brewery, five stories high, the shoe factory, a three-story building only a year old, a four-story brick flour mill, two theaters, five public halls, the Odd Fellows' Temple, and a score of office buildings, retail stores, and flats and lodgings—all are gone, and nothing left but rubbish.

Yet with magnificent courage Santa Rosa is rising from her wreck and ashes.