Fortunately, we don’t feel many earthquakes in Annapolis. When a magnitude 5.8 quake shook the city shortly before 2pm on August 23, 2011, my wife and I were three hours away in the Shenandoah Valley, helping our two sons move into their college housing for the new academic year. I was leaning into my car to pull out a box when it suddenly rocked back and forth. At first, I thought a strong gust of wind was the cause, but when nearby doors flew open and students rushed outside to see what was going on, it soon became clear that something bigger had happened.
The next day, I returned to my third-story office in the William Paca House to find that a metal shelving unit had buckled and spilled some books and binders on the floor. Not exactly a disaster scene of epic proportions, but I was glad not to have been sitting at my desk when the shelves crumpled. According to Wikipedia, the 2011 earthquake “was felt across more than a dozen U.S. states and in several Canadian provinces, and was felt by more people than any other quake in U.S. history.” Its epicenter was near Mineral, Virginia, 60 miles southeast of where I had felt it and 100 miles southwest of Annapolis.
Earthquakes weren’t common natural occurrences in colonial Maryland, but neither were they completely unknown 250 years ago. The April 30, 1772 Maryland Gazette reported that there had been “a slight Shock of an Earthquake” in Annapolis at about 8:00 in the morning on the previous Saturday. The one-sentence article noted that the quake “was also felt in almost every Part of this Province,” but it had nothing to say about any injuries or damage, presumably because there wasn’t anything to relate.
Some earlier reports about earthquakes were a bit more descriptive than this spare 1772 story, probably because Jonas Green (publisher of the Maryland Gazette from 1745 to 1767) had more dramatic flair and taste for the sensational about him than did his very sensible widow and successor Anne Catharine Green (publisher from 1767 to 1775).
On November 20, 1755, Mr. Green resorted to ALL CAPS when he described the recent “Shock of an EARTHQUAKE, which was very sensibly felt by a great Number of People in Town, and round about it; and we have heard of it’s being felt in Prince George’s County in many Parts, and on the Eastern Shore.” The quake lasted for “about a Minute” in Annapolis, and there was no known damage.
Noah Webster (of later dictionary fame) made note of this 1755 earthquake in his 1799 two-volume work A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases; with the Principal Phenomena of the Physical World, which Precede and Accompany Them, and Observations Deduced from the Facts Stated. But the “violent and extensive shock” experienced in America on November 18 paled in comparison to the seismic catastrophe that struck Portugal just 17 days earlier, when “a tremendous convulsion laid Lisbon in ruins, with the destruction of 50,000 lives.” An additional 10,000 people died on one of the islands in the Azores archipelago.
It took several weeks for news of the disaster to reach America. The first report of this “most terrible EARTHQUAKE in Europe” published by Jonas Green in the January 8, 1756 Maryland Gazette came via a “Gentleman just come to Town, who had a short Passage from Boston,” where he had “read in their Public Prints, an Account brought from Spain, That the City of Cadiz has suffer’d greatly, and that 15,000 People were drowned.” Lisbon had also “suffer’d great Damage, and many other Places in that Neighborhood.” Mr. Green couldn’t provide any more details “till we have further Accounts, the Purport of which we greatly dread.” When they arrived in the following weeks and months, those additional reports only confirmed the scale of physical destruction and human suffering caused by the earthquake.
When Annapolitans felt the earth move under their feet on March 22, 1758, many of their thoughts must have flown immediately to the European calamity of 1755. Jonas Green’s very descriptive article in the next day’s Maryland Gazette expressed their collective relief that Annapolis had been spared the fate of Lisbon: “Last Night, at Two Minutes before X, when the Air was very clear and serene, we had here a very considerable Shock of an EARTHQUAKE; but, thro’ GOD’s Mercy, it has done no Damage that we have yet heard of. For about ¼ of a Minute before the Shock, there was a rumbling Noise, not unlike that of Carriage Wheels on Pavements or frozen Ground, at a distance, which encreased ’til the Shaking, and that lasted about half a Minute.”
Mr. Green’s vivid prose really puts my “I felt my car move, and some books fell” story to shame, but I’m OK with that if it means I never have to experience a more unsettling earthquake than that of 2011.
You can read the April 30, 1772 issue of the Maryland Gazette beginning here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001282/html/m1282-0096.html
Noah Webster’s A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases… is available through Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Brief_History_of_Epidemic_and_Pestilen/uen8dansteEC?hl=en
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
