Old photos capture turmoil of 1906 quake

When Jonathan Hermance's parents died, he and his wife, Susan, inherited a "bunch of family photographs" in a box, she said.

Not all were typical pictures of relatives. Three turned out to be sensational views of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which occurred 100 years ago today.

Although faded in places, the small, panoramic prints are dramatic images of the killer earthquake and fire that followed.

None of the other photographs in the box used the same format, leading Susan Hermance, a Deseret Morning News copy editor, to wonder whether someone in her husband's family took the pictures or if the family acquired them from a professional photographer.

What she knows is that her husband's grandparents, Harry Putnam Hermance and Sibyl Hermance, had homes in San Francisco and Atlanta in the early 20th century. In California, Harry Putnam Hermance "started the Woolworth Co. on the West Coast, and they lived on Filbert Street in San Francisco," she said.

One story handed down through the generations relates that the Hermance family "buried their silver in a captain's chest in the back yard" to protect it when fires spread after the earthquake.

Another family heirloom is a small cloisonne vase. "It's blackened and it looks just awful," she said. Inside was a note in Sibyl Hermance's handwriting saying the vase was found after their house burned during the post-quake conflagration that swept San Francisco.

But the most shocking souvenirs of that calamity a century ago are the photos.

• Taken from a hillside perch, one view shows an apparently undamaged cityscape in the foreground, but then the scene changes into a wall of boiling smoke. The city is burning, and to emphasize that, someone retouched parts of the negative by drawing in flames. Even without the flames, the photo would be shocking, with the dark and light clouds of churning smoke.

• In another, a few building skeletons stick out of a moonscape of charred rubble. Chimneys that once were part of homes reach into a hazy sky. In the midst of hills of wreckage — twisted pipes, bricks and metal — two figures survey the wasteland.

• Acres of wreckage reminiscent of a city bombed in World War II show in the foreground of a photo labeled "East from Van Ness," while in the distance, buildings display varying amounts of damage. Sometimes partial walls are standing, while one large structure looks relatively unscathed.

---

E-mail: bau@desnews.com