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Source:
History of Seneca County : from the close of the Revolutionary War to
July, 1880 :
embracing many personal sketches of pioneers, anecdotes,
and
faithful descriptions of events pertaining to the organization of the
county and its progress
Published: Springfield, Ohio: Transcript Print. Co.,
1880
APPENDIX.
NO. I.
THE EARTHQUAKE - THE GREAT HURRICANE - THE JERKS - THE
MORMONS -
VAN BURENITE SALUTATORY - THE OLD STATE HOUSE.
PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PHENOMENA.
THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE
On the 15th day of December,
1811, the first great shock of an earthquake occurred, that shook the
whole majestic valley of the Mississippi to the center, and made the
Allegheny mountains tremble beneath its gigantic throes. Its
convulsions agitated even the waves of the Atlantic ocean. The
subterranean forces which produced such results must have been of
inconceivable magnitude.
The region on the west bank of the Mississippi and in
the southern part of the state of Missouri seems to have been the center
of the most violent shocks. They were repeated at intervals of two
or three months. These shocks, in their terrible upheavings of the
earth, equal any phenomena of the kind of which history gives any
record. The country was very thinly settled, and there were but
few educated men in the whole region who could philosophically note the
phenomena which were witnessed. Fortunately, most of the houses
were very frail, being built of logs. Such structures would sway
to and fro with the surgings of the earth, but they were not easily
thrown down. Vast tracts of land were precipitated into the
turbid, foaming current of the Mississippi. The graveyard at New
Madrid was at one swoop torn away, and with all its mouldering dead,
swept down the stream.
Most of the houses in New Madrid were destroyed.
Large regions of forest, miles of extent, suddenly sank out of sight,
while the waters rushed in forming, upon the spot, almost fathomless
lakes. Other lakes were drained, leaving only vast basins of mud,
where, apparently for centuries, in the solitudes of the forest, the
waves had rolled.
The whole wilderness of territory extending from the
mouth of the Ohio, three hundred miles, to the St. Francis, was so
convulsed as to create lakes and islands, ravines and marshes, whose
numbers never can be fully known. Some of the effects produced
were very difficult to account for. Large trees were split through
the heart of the tough wood. The trees were inclined in every
direction, and were lodged in every angle towards the earth or the
horizon. The undulations of the earth resembled the surges of the
tempest-tossed ocean, the billows ever increasing in magnitude. At
the greatest elevation these earth billows would burst open,and water,
sand and coal would beejected as high as the loftiest trees. Some
of the chasms thus created were very deep.
Wide districts were covered by a shower of small white
sand, like the ground after a snow storm. This spread of
desolation rendered the region around quit4e uninhabitable for a long
time. Other immense tracts were flooded with water from a few
inches to a few feet deep. As the water subsided a coating of
barren sand left behind.
Indeed, it must have been a scene of horror in these
deeps forests, and in the gloom of the darkest night, and by wading in
teh water to the middle to fly from those concussions, which were
occurring every few hours, with a notice equally terrible to beasts and
birds and to man. The birds themselves lost all power and
disposition to fly, and retreated to the bosoms of men - their fellow
sufferers - in this general convulsion. A few persons sank in
these chasms, and were providentially extricated. A number
perished who sank with their boats in the Mississippi. A bursting
of the earth just below the village of New Madrid arrested the mighty
Mississippi in its course, and caused a reflux of its waters, by which,
in a little time, a great number of boats were swept by the ascending
current into the outh of the bayou, carried out and left upon the dry
earth when the accumulating waters of the river had again cleared the
current.
The following is from "The Great West,"
There were a number of severe shocks, but the two series of concussions
were particularly terrible, far more so than the rest. The shocks
were clearly distinguished into two classes - those in which the motion
was horizontal, and those in which it was perpendicular. The
latter were attended with explosions, and the terrible mixture of noises
that preceded and accompanied the earthquakes in a louder degree, but
were by no means so desolating and destructive as the other. The
houses crumbled, the trees weaved together, the ground sunk, while ever
and anon vivid flashes of lightning, gleaming through the troubled
clouds of night, rendered the darkness doubly horrible. After the
severest shocks, a dense, black cloud of vapor overshadowed the land,
through which no struggling sunbeam found its way to cheer the heart of
man. The sulphurated gasses that were discharged during the shocks
tainted the air with their noxious effluvia, and so impregnated the
water of the river for one hundred and fifty miles as to render it unfit
for use.
In the intervals of the earthquake were there was one
evening, and that a brilliant and cloudless one, in which the western
sky was a continued glare of repeated peals of subterranean thunder,
seeming to proceed, as the flashes did, from below the horizon.
The night, which was so conspicuous for subterranean thunder, was the
same period in which the fatal earthquakes at Caracas, in South America,
occurred, and it is supposed that these flashes and those events were
part of the same scene.
MORE TO COME....
THE GREAT HURRICANE.
THE MORMONS.
MORMONISM.
SALUTATORY.
THE OLD STATE HOUSE
EXTRACT FROM THE ADDRESS OF GOVERNOR CHASE.
DIRGE OF THE STATE HOUSE BELL.
By J. M. D.
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