April 18, 1906

Dear Sister and Brother, We are all alive. Home not burned yet. Going to the hills as fire is coming this way fast. Clark.

This note, written on a scrap of paper the day of the earthquake, says more about the desperation of people in San Francisco in April 1906 than I could get from reading a dozen history books on the earthquake. It inspired my colleagues and me to tell the story of the average person caught up in a disaster of epic proportions as we designed and built our earthquake exhibit for Wells Fargo’s History Museum  in San Francisco. To help our visitors get a real feel for the disaster, we included a do-it-yourself shake table, where people make a quake, hear the earth rumble, and then compare their experience to 1906. So far we’ve had bankers, kids, and grandmothers all try to make "The Big One" happen all over again… and again. AND again. :)

In planning our exhibit, it helped that Wells Fargo itself is an earthquake survivor. Although the building burned, Wells Fargo’s bank resumed business, and like the city of St. Francis, rose from the ruins. The exhibit title, “San Francisco is in Ashes—The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906” comes from a letter written by Wells Fargo Bank President I.W. Hellman one day after the quake. “San Francisco is in Ashes - every building of consequence is demolished,” Hellman wrote.

As I carefully stacked fire-blackened ledger books for the exhibit, I opened the pages to April 17, 1906, and saw mundane transactions: deposits supposed to be available the following day, columns of dollars routinely added. As he locked the door and fled the fire that morning, could bank cashier Fred Lipman have imagined the magnitude of the disaster about to wipe out a great American city? Even more frightening, could we ourselves be witnesses to such an historic event in our lifetimes?