No, this isn’t a tale about corporate corruption. Back in the day, Wells Fargo and other banks tracked accounts using large leatherbound books called Boston Ledgers. These books contained a bank customer’s daily transactions, with names and dates recorded at the foot of the page.

For weeks after the quake, guards watched over the sealed cash and record vaults of Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank on Montgomery Street. Finally, when it was determined that the vaults were cool enough to handle, workers were brought in to open them and retrieve their contents. Frederick Lipman, the cashier, had been waiting anxiously for this. Previously, he was told by the bank’s vice-president that all the books were destroyed:

The vaults had been opened... it was the worst half-hour that I ever have lived. I pictured all my future being devoted to what could be done to restore the records in our books...

... I went downtown. It was the longest trip I ever took in my life. It happened that when we put the books away hastily into the vault on the 18th that some of them were just thrown in on the floor. And this book vault was built on the bank floor which was one story above the basement and it was built on [iron] framework.

As it turned out, luck was on Lipman’s side:

... It didn’t go down to the ground. So the fire in the basement had run along and it had just cooked the vault. What was on the floor was a floury ash. That was the worst part, but after that it began to be better... we found that only one ledger was destroyed. That was but one out of fifteen or sixteen. Then we found at the bottom of the vault the lower part of each book where it was found and that gave us the footing on each page. By that footing we had proof of what the limit was on that page. We felt better when we saw that. We had the footing of each page and the statements and we proved to within $100...

Ledgers that had been stacked tightly merely charred around the edges, their pages so dense and so heavy that the superheated air could not penetrate them. The books and about $3,000,000 in gold and silver were carried out of the vaults and transferred to the new operating quarters a few blocks down Montgomery in the Union Trust Building.

Ninety-five years later, a similar event would take place, this time in New York City. The Bank of Nova Scotia’s offices were destroyed during the attack on the World Trade Center. Read the account of Richard Garlock , a structural engineer who led construction workers during recovery efforts at the ruins, as he beheld the contents of the Bank of Nova Scotia’s vaults (from the PBS series America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero):

The vault was huge — two levels, 3,000 square feet each. When they opened the door, I realized why it was so big: there was a lot of gold and silver. The silver bars were like large loaves of bread, only they weighed about 70 pounds. The gold was smaller, but also very heavy, about 28 pounds each.

Cooked books? Loaves of bread? In Fred Lipman's words: "That was a dramatic affair. It saved us..."