On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1906, all was quiet in Fair Oaks. The sky was clear, and residents of what would become Atherton celebrated the holiday with gatherings of friends and family at sumptuous dinners featuring produce grown on their estates.
At Sacred Heart Schools, students had gone home to their families and so the campus was nearly empty. Mother Emily Healy vividly remembers the tranquility that descended on the little community the day before the devastating San Francisco earthquake:
“Never had Easter Sunday seemed more peaceful and happy, never had Menlo Park appeared to greater advantage, and we were jubilant [with] the climbing roses in full bloom. The evening was beautiful, the stars brilliant, nothing foreboded the awful catastrophe of the next morning.”
The serene night passed. Just after 5 a.m., Mother Healy had just arisen for early Mass when the earth began to roll:
“I was almost dressed when … the house was shaken to its very foundations by the most severe earthquake California has known … A large cupboard filled with heavy books in my little attic cell was overturned, my wash-stand dashed to one side, basin upset, and myself thrown to the other end of my room. I caught hold of my crucifix, knelt down clinging to my bedstead, and cried out: ‘My Jesus, mercy!’ over and over again, while the plaster was falling all over and around me, and noise of falling bricks was deafening.”
Chandeliers came crashing down
Across town on Atherton Avenue, Phyllis Moulton, a little girl, awoke to find her bedroom in her family home swaying back and forth. She was terrified, but came up with an ingenious solution for coping with the fearful shaking:
“We were pretty scared. The earthquake took the chandeliers which were leaded and hung down, swung them back and forth and snapped them right off the ceiling, and dropped them on the floor. That was something. To come in and find the chandeliers right on the floor. That happened in two rooms.”
“I had a little theory — because we used to have earthquakes quite often and I was very much afraid of them. I thought that maybe if I jumped up and down on the bed, I wouldn’t know which was shaking, me or the earthquake. I did this, and the first thing I knew, my bed crashed. I had weakened the bed as I was really jumping and keeping right up with the earthquake. Anyway, I finally managed to get out of there, with everything shaking, myself included.”
Throughout Fair Oaks, chimneys crashed, horses bolted, and roofs caved in. In the darkness of the morning, residents blindly sought refuge wherever they could. Young Phyllis looked for her parents: “My mother and father, whose bedroom was across the hall, started toward me, and we met at my doorway. You were supposed to stand with the bracing of the door. We all stood there with our arms around each other, wondering when the next thing was coming down.”
Plaster down, statues down
At Sacred Heart, Mother Healy tried to find out how extensive the damage was:
“The thought of death did not occur to me, but I felt sure the house would cave in. I rushed downstairs carrying my bedclothes to the garden. I had to pass a heap of bricks that had fallen on the attic floor; by six the floor gave way under the fallen chimney. Is it not miraculous that no one sustained any serious injury, only bumps and bruises from being thrown down?
“Going downstairs, the sight was pitiable all the way — plaster down, statues thrown down and broken … the arcade with its massive columns had been wrenched out of place and thrown against the children’s refectory and the assembly room, breaking the windows in its fall. The coping along the north, west and east had fallen with a hail of bricks and mortar: the devastation was complete.”
City residents look for refuge
Meanwhile, part-time residents who wintered in San Francisco and spent summers in Fair Oaks, were also contending with the awful temblors that rolled through their city houses. Years later, Leland Stanford Prior Jr., 4, recalled the earthquake in San Francisco:
“That ‘earth-shaking’ day of April 18,1906, a lasting imprint was made on my memory — the house shaking, moldings falling from the ceiling onto my bed, screams and confusion!” All communications with the lower San Francisco Peninsula were cut off, and so the Priors and other families with property in Fair Oaks had no idea if their summer homes were still standing.
One of these families, the Jennings, lived near the Priors in San Francisco by 25th Avenue and, like the Priors, had a Fair Oaks estate on Middlefield Avenue. Thomas J. Jennings, then a little boy, vividly recalled the harrowing trip down the Peninsula, with his parents desperately hoping that the devastation they had just experienced in San Francisco was not as complete:
“It was about the third or fourth day after the earthquake that [my parents] decided that the whole city was going to burn and we would have to get out of the city and come down here, so they put us into a carriage and galloped across to the old railway station at 26th and Valencia Street.
“At that point, very vividly in my memory, I can see it, thousands and thousands of people walking, coming up from the burning district as refugees and we felt we were refugees also. We piled onto the train — we must have had 20 or 30 cars — and it pulled out with all these people who had some place to go. My mother, my grandmother, my sister and the people who worked for us — the cook, the housemaid, and so on — they piled into the train, not knowing if the house at Fair Oaks was still standing.”
Peninsula wonderfully quiet
“The trip down the Peninsula was agonizingly slow. The earthquake had twisted the tracks and so the train could not go more than about five miles per hour. Traumatized by the turmoil and fires they had just witnessed, Peninsula families wondered if they would have to endure even more devastation at their second homes.”
Thomas Jennings recalls the utter relief of finding that the Peninsula community was largely intact:
“The next thing I remember was the wonderful quiet, peacefulness of arriving in Fair Oaks. The house was seriously damaged. The plaster was all down. All the dishes were broken, the chimneys down.”
But no fires had started and the family could still live in their home. Like so many other Fair Oaks residents, they were overjoyed.
Their neighbors on Middlefield Avenue, the Prior family, also discovered severe damage to their Fair Oaks estate, but a livable house. Leland Stanford Prior Jr. recalls: “All the eight fireplaces and chimneys, some of them three stories high, had collapsed and the rubble completely filled the basement, milk room and all!”
The chimneys were never repaired and from then on, the house was drafty and hard to heat. Yet it was undamaged enough to provide refuge to dozens of Prior relatives, and to remain the family home until the early 1930s, when it finally burned.
And so, the little community of Fair Oaks quickly recovered from the worst of the earthquake. Indeed, as dawn lifted the morning of the quake, Mother Healy was already hauling debris out of the Sacred Heart Schools church.
She recalls: “Mother Didier and myself began to clear the chapel of its fallen plaster, and we were one hour getting it even tolerably ready for Mass. At the usual hour, 6:45 a.m., Rev. Father Meyer from the Seminary began the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in thanksgiving for our escape.”
The Fair Oaks community, long a sanctuary from the noise and pollution of rowdy San Francisco, became an even more important refuge for its summer residents. In fact, many decided to move permanently down the Peninsula to the beloved homes that stood through one of the worst disasters of the 20th Century.
Pam Gullard is co-author with Portola Valley town historian Nancy Lund of an upcoming book about the 1906 Earthquake. Quotes from Mother Emily Healy come from “Heritage with the future: Sacred Heart School’s Centennial 1898-1998” by Sr. Nancy Morris and the staff of Sacred Heart Schools. The other memoirs are from the Atherton Heritage Foundation archives.
