The population in the Portola Valley/Woodside area was sparse on April 18, 1906. Few folks living there then recorded their experiences on that terrifying day, although experts from Stanford and elsewhere investigated in the following days and weeks and wrote up their observations. Even fewer people lived in the valley when the great earthquakes of 1839, 1861 and 1868 struck.
However, in 1879, when an enterprising reporter for the San Francisco Call took his notepad and pencil and went to interview an early pioneer, Charles Brown, he discovered quite a story. Brown had experienced the 1839 earthquake! It is the earliest known account of an earthquake on this part of the San Andreas Fault.
Charles, also known as Carlos Moreno, had purchased a portion of Canada de Raymundo from John Copinger, built the adobe that still stands near the intersection of Woodside and Portola roads, and was living there with his wife and a Californio helper in the 1830s.
Forty years after the great 1839 quake, Brown’s experience was vivid in his memory. His story may contain the exaggerations of an old man reminiscing, but his account of what he witnessed is considered credible enough to have appeared in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America in 1947 accompanied with an analysis by a contemporary geologist.
Brown had been out all day cutting wood and had just entered his house when he was struck by a severe blow on the back of his head. A vat suspended from the ceiling, used to hold lard, was swinging wildly. Just then, he felt the house rock and the floor tremble. He rushed to the door and saw the earth rising and falling in solid waves.
“The redwoods rocked like lake-side reeds,” he said. “Thousands of them were broken off and hurled through the air for immense distances.” His worker threw himself to the ground and prayed for deliverance from impending death.
Mrs. Brown had been washing clothes in the nearby creek. The bed of the stream was uplifted, and the water poured over her.
Adobe houses, with walls several feet thick, were cracked from top to bottom, and fissures were made in their walls wide enough for a person to walk through. The ground was cracked in all directions.
Charles Brown told the reporter that he had felt many earthquakes since his arrival in California but none that had approached the violence of the one in 1839. He expressed the opinion that it was impossible to make a building so strong as to be earthquake proof.
Still, 167 years after that cataclysmic1839 event, after four more major temblors have hit the area, his adobe house still stands.
Nancy Lund is the Portola Valley town historian and a member of the Almanac’s Panel of Contributors.
