Maine’s strongest earthquake hit a century ago

The strongest earthquake ever recorded in Maine occurred a century ago on March 21, 1904. The newspapers described it in near biblical terms.

Before the earth started to shake, “a great brilliancy” lighted up the horizons, and the wind, which had been blowing fiercely for hours, died away. Shortly after 1 a.m., a loud rumble rent the air followed by a violent jarring of the earth.

Other tremors followed in the next few hours, the number and intensity varying depending on whether you were in Calais or Eastport near the heart of the quake or in Bangor or somewhere else in New England or the Martime Provinces.

Chaos briefly ruled in many communities.

In Calais, the night operator for the telephone company was knocked off his stool just before frightened calls started coming in. Buildings rocked, pictures fell from the walls and chimneys were shaken to pieces.

A man staying at the St. Croix Hotel ran outside armed with a revolver, thinking the bank across the street was being robbed. He was praised for his courage.

Across the St. Croix River in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, bricks were dislodged from the walls of the Methodist church.

“Inhabitants of the city were paralyzed with fear,” declared the Ellsworth correspondent for the Bangor Daily Commercial. The large plate glass window in Edwin M. Moore’s fish market was cracked, and one of the chimneys on City Hall broke in half while the other was badly damaged.

The bell on the Bar Harbor fire-engine house started to sway, galvanizing the firemen to action.

A man in Belfast fired his pistol into the air to frighten away thieves after he heard a neighbor scream.

In Bangor, lights went on all over the city. People poured into the streets in some neighborhoods, and guests filled the corridors of hotels. Calls deluged the police and the night staff at the Bangor Daily News. Some wondered if the gas works had blown up, or if the Thomas Hill Standpipe had “bust.”

“Some plunged for the cellar to look after the boiler, some opened windows to see what their neighbors were doing, others turned hot-water faucets to ease the kitchen tanks. Everybody was nervous, and in some cases, serious illness followed. Druggists were busy Monday dealing out doses for nausea and dizziness, conditions which often follow a shock of this sort,” wrote a Bangor Daily News reporter.

When all was said and done, however, even the news scribes had to admit not much damage had occurred other than fractured chimneys, broken china, dislodged pipes and shifted staircases.

The papers sought out experts to explain the quake. One of the first consulted was Frank H. Damon, chairman of the physics department at Bangor High School. He was “a man who has had experience with earthquakes in South America.”

He assured a reporter that the quake was “not in any way volcanic.” Many readers doubtlessly were thinking about the eruption of Mont Pelee in Martinique two years before that had destroyed an entire city, killing 38,000 people.

Experts at Harvard University declared the quake insignificant. But professor Leslie A. Lee of Bowdoin described it as the “most interesting one which has occurred in New England in many years.” He was impressed with the range of the shock.

Analyzing the quake in the Seismological Society of America Bulletin several years later, Harry Fielding Reid wrote that it had been felt as far away as South Norwalk, Conn., Balston Spa, N.Y., and Montreal.

At Bar Harbor, nine shocks were reported before 7 a.m. and three more during the day. At Bangor, nine shocks had been counted in two hours, Reid wrote.

Immediately after the event, editorial writers took the position there was little to worry about. That summer the Bangor Daily News was still trying to convince people there was nothing to worry about. Slight shocks had been felt in succeeding months including one on July 15 in Surry, West Franklin, Orland and probably other communities.

A century later, scientists are still unable to say whether Maine will ever experience a really destructive earthquake. I checked the Web page for the Maine Geological Survey. “Most Maine earthquakes are of small magnitude,” according to an interesting paper posted there by Henry N. Berry IV. “Many are too small to feel. No Maine earthquake has caused significant damage. The persistent activity, however, indicates that some crustal deformation is occurring and that a larger earthquake cannot be ruled out.”

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War-era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.