At a church revival in Newberry County, 150 miles west of Charleston, the preacher was ending the sermon when a rumbling rose like distant thunder. Then the church rocked, as if it were a baby’s cradle.
An elderly church member, Aunt Melvina, hollered: “De world comin’ to de end.” The preacher yelled: “Oh, Lordy” before he and his congregation rushed into the moonlight. The church shook a second time. Someone cried out: “De devil under de church!”
When the convulsions ceased, the train depot’s telegraph operator reported that an earthquake had struck near Charleston, too far away to hurt local folks. But in the port city, the historic 7.3 magnitude earthquake caused extensive damage.
The rippling tremors were felt all the way from Cuba into Maine. It damaged buildings in central Ohio. Scientists couldn’t measure the seismic waves because the nation’s only crude earthquake gauge had been removed from the Washington Monument for cleaning.
By the late 1800s, trouble had become routine in Charleston, a city that had endured hurricanes, fires, sickness, riots and two wars, one with the British and then U.S. troops. Life had changed for many of Charleston’s black residents, who were a generation from slavery and on the thresholds of oppressive Jim Crow laws.
The earth had given warnings, but it was, and still is, difficult to predict an earthquake, said Susan Williams, co-author of Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow. Recent tremors across South Carolina, she said, have raised public awareness of earthquake threats on the East Coast. “We should take this as a wake-up call.”
Prior to the 1886 earthquake, a swarm of tremors swept through the area, frightening locals, but none were strong enough to knock a tea cup off a shelf. “A series of quakes were reported in the newspapers, particularly in Summerville a few days before the big quake,” she said. It was a sign of a widening East Coast fault.
Quakes have been around for a long time
Centuries before Europeans and Africans arrived here, strong earthquakes changed the course of coastal rivers. Williams pointed to the “elbow bends” in the Cooper, Ashley, Edisto, Sampit and Black rivers as evidence of pre-historic massive geologic upheavals.
That was before recorded time, so without that lived experience, Lowcountry residents are now nonchalant about earthquakes. Instead, hurricanes are the biggest worry.
After examining a trove of records and old newspapers with her co-author historian, Stephen G. Hoffius, Williams feels confident the city’s buildings would not fare well even in a moderate earthquake. “I am sure that (earthquake damage) is in practically every building that was standing in the 1880s, but there just hasn’t been a shake (strong) enough to dislodge it all again.”
She suggests local officials should conduct earthquake drills and homeowners should buy earthquake insurance policies.
If an earthquake strikes, evacuating the building is the first impulse, but that’s not a good idea, said Williams, a retired English professor at Trident Technical College. She recommends remaining inside and sheltering under a stable object like a table. *Being crushed by falling debris outside is a real risk that happened in 1886, she said.
The William Ravenel House at 13 East Battery before the 1886 earthquake (left) which damaged the portico. Today, the railing at the top of the portico is missing (right). | Photos courtesy Gibbes Museum of Art; Rūta Smith
Three epicenters in 1886
Most of the physical manifestations of the 1886 quake occurred near the three epicenters to the north and west of the city. On the Charleston peninsula, public buildings and private houses made with bricks, as opposed to wood frame structures, suffered most of the damage. Williams is concerned that buildings on the west side of the city built on filled-in marshes or “made land” are potentially more susceptible to quake damage. More modern buildings, she added, were likely constructed under regulations that account for an earthquake.
Following the 1886 quake, relief money from around the country and the world poured into Charleston, but it took time to distribute the aid. The city had to invent a way to hand it out. A soup kitchen fed people, who also received rations. Within three weeks, however, the food aid and temporary shelter were transitioned to another kind of assistance, Williams said.
City officials were eager to move from feeding people and providing temporary housing to giving relief money to repair homes. “They were so worried about whether they were giving (aid) to ‘worthy people,’” she said. “They were also worried whether laborers would stop working if they had enough to eat and a place to live.”
Worthy people in those days meant white people, Williams explained. “They were much more inclined to think of poor white people as being worthy than poor black people. That was a holdover from slavery.”
Hoffius said two pivotal moments in U.S. history bookend the “Great Quake” of 1886 — the end of Reconstruction and the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized segregation. In the middle of this social change and natural disaster stood Frank Dawson, the popular editor of The News and Courier. For a man of his time, Dawson’s moderate voice was considered progressive although his attitudes by today’s standards would be described as racist.
Less than three years after the quake, Dawson was shot dead in the home of a prominent doctor. A jury, including seven black men, acquitted the confessed killer following a week-long trial that drew national attention. Dawson had dreamed that Charleston would build a new progressive city on the ruins of the old one, Hoffius said. Instead, Charleston followed the rest of the South to craft a social order that returned black Charlestonians to conditions close to slavery.
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