Part of the larger story of the quake of '06 is how the water mains were wrecked and the firefighters had to stand by and watch the City burn. The San Francisco Fire Department 
has its own history of competence and innovation and fire fighting in general had made great strides in technique and technology by 1906. But call it one of the ironies of the disaster—a peninsula surrounded by an ocean and a bay, but no way to get all that water on the flames.
Before the Fire Department became pro in the 1860s, it was all volunteer. Despite overblown legends, there WERE a lot of fires and the volunteers attacked them with zeal and dash. Companies challenged each others' skills and had mascots. The mascot of Company No. 5 was their neighbor, Lilly Coit , who had cheered them on since she was a kid. She was a socialite, married a rich guy and loved to have fun: most historical accounts portray her as a real pistol. When she died in 1929, she left some money to the City, who built Coit Tower with the bequest, honoring her and Engine Company No. 5. We have a red pair of Lilly's shoes in the Wells Fargo Archives—size 6.
In Lilly Coit’s time, as modern methods were in development, fire fighters used glass orbs called fire grenades. Firemen would come barreling into the structure armed with these grenades and lob them into the flames. The enclosed salt water solution would ostensibly smother the blaze. Or people bought them and kept them around the house as an antique version of the fire extinguisher—in a variety of colors and styles to match any décor.
What a great blog on the 1906 earthquake. Rivetting are the vignettes on life in San Francisco at the time of the earthquake, the eyewitness accounts of the quake itself and the immediate and long-term effects of the disaster. Through entries that vary in tone and temper but are uniformly well-researched, the visitor gets a moving sense of how the calamity drastically changed the lives of specific survivors and of the city itself. Through period photos and the photos of period pieces (notably, Lilly Coit's size 6 pair and the fire grenades), the milieu of 1906 is resurrected from the ashes. Wells Fargo should be lauded for conserving and sharing its astounding and priceless collection of San Francisco memorabilia. I can think of no other bank that serves not only as a repository of the people's financial foresight but as a treasury of the nation's collective memory as well.
Great story, this blog you guys are putting up is so interesting.