Photo by Steve Johnson

Don Lowe survived the infamous San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. The 102-year-old was photographed Monday at his home in Ashland.

Ashland man recalls 1906 S.F. quake

By PAUL FATTIG

ASHLAND -- It's 94 years to the day since that horrific morning, but the raw images remain strong and stark in Don Lowe's mind.

"I can still remember the streets of Frisco terribly broken up and dead bodies and stuff laying around," said Lowe, 102. "It was a real bad time."

A very bad time, indeed.

The longtime Ashland resident is one of the few surviving witnesses of the great San Francisco earthquake that struck the city on April 18, 1906.

Later estimated to have registered 8.3 on the Richter scale, it killed 700 people, making it the most devastating earthquake in the nation's history.

Eight-year-old Lowe and his father, D.M. Lowe, had come the previous day by train from their farm near Ukiah, Calif. In town to sell horses, they were staying at the Palace Hotel. They were sleeping in their room on the third floor when the earthquake struck at 5:13 a.m.

"It rolled me right out of bed," he said. "Dad didn't get knocked out. But we got right out of there.

"Dad was a solid man," Lowe added. "He didn't frighten much. But it was scary. He got right out of that building."

In addition to devastating the downtown area, the quake severely damaged the city water system. Fire departments were unable to put out the fires sparked by the quaking earth.

The city of 350,000 by the bay burned for three days before the fires were extinguished by exhausted firefighters using dynamite to create a fire break. When the smoke finally cleared, nearly 500 blocks of buildings were leveled by the combination of quake, fire and dynamite.

Born Oct. 30, 1897, in Hopland, Calif., near Ukiah, Lowe often traveled with his father who sold and bought horses and cattle.

A former logger who retired as an electrician from the city of Ashland, the younger Lowe originally moved to Ashland with his parents in 1909.

Although he uses a hearing aid, his health remains as strong as his memories of that day that shook the Bay Area.

"My wife and I stayed in the Palace Hotel later and tried to get the same room my dad and I stayed in but we couldn't," he said. "It had been completely remodeled."

His wife, Jacqueline, died in 1993. They had been married more than 70 years.

Lowe and his dad were in town that day in 1906 bringing horses by train to the San Francisco Fire Department.

"We had just delivered some horses," he said. "But there was some relatives coming out from Missouri. We were to meet them at the hotel."

Unbeknownst to the Lowes, however, the relatives had taken an earlier train north to Ukiah.

The hotel, although damaged, fortunately was one of the few buildings left standing by the quake. Other buildings close to the hotel were destroyed, he said.

It was still dark when the Lowes reached the street that morning.

"There was very little movement, a few wagons," he said. "There were a lot of people on the street, getting out of the buildings. We could still see buildings shaking. There were aftershocks, even three or four hours later."

Many who survived the quake perished in the fires. "It was the fires that Dad was getting away from mostly," he said. "There was big cracks all over. People had fallen in them. There was a lot of people killed, a lot of people hurt."

Initially, his dad tried to get them a boat ride north across the bay. "We couldn't make it," Lowe said. "All the docks were in such bad shape. What few boats there were, why, the police and so forth had them. ... trying to save lives."

So father and son started walking south, heading to the nearest train station. "There was places where we had to help one another over as we went along," he said.

Other than vegetables picked from local gardens, they didn't eat that day, he said.

"It seems like we walked nearly a day when we run into some nice horses running loose on the road," he said. "We borrowed them horses to get out to Salinas, where we could get a train out of there."

It took the Lowes four days to reach their home in Ukiah, thankful to have survived the deadly earthquake.

"I never been in one since," he said. "But, yep, that was plenty."