Jordan appointed a committee of engineering professors and architects to examine campus structures. Three days after the quake, they reported that the Inner Quad was largely undamaged, as were most of the Outer Quad’s one-story buildings and the larger buildings along its front. The chemistry building, near the Oval, lost its chimneys and part of its façade. At Encina Hall, two walls needed to be rebuilt and fallen chimneys repaired. Minor damage from falling chimneys at Roble Hall also needed repair. “Our full and detailed examination of the buildings from foundation to roof shows that the actual damage to their stability is less than might be inferred from external appearances,” the committee wrote.
As for the structures in ruins, the University could function without them. The quake destroyed several poorly constructed, grandiose edifices, including the unfinished neoclassical gymnasium, the unoccupied neoclassical library and the 10-story Memorial Arch at the Quad’s front entrance. The museum’s new wings, Palm Drive’s entry gates and the Quad’s back arcade collapsed. Damage to Memorial Church was the most lamented. Its huge steeple/clock tower fell, and the church façade rested in the courtyard. But the building’s side walls and stained-glass windows and the organ were virtually unscathed.
Within hours of the quake, adventurous students began making their way to San Francisco to view its damage and the raging fire, search for family members and offer help. On Friday, in conjunction with a Palo Alto group that had formed the day before, the student body began organizing a massive relief effort for the City. The Daily Palo Alto (predecessor of the Stanford Daily) published a list of 22 team captains, including future Board of Trustees President Paul C. Edwards, Class of 1906 (whom Georgina Lyman would marry); future English professor Edith Mirrielees, Class of 1906; and Elsie Branner, Class of 1908, daughter of future Stanford president John Casper Branner. Stanford volunteers were assigned a building at 25th and Guerrero streets as their headquarters. The first weeks were chaotic, and when Stanford chaplain D. Charles Gardner saw some student relief workers subsisting on dirty prunes, he set up a stove and cooked for volunteers. Other students served with the militia or as deputy sheriffs, assigned to such tasks as guarding railroad bridges.
Soon after the shaking ceased, residents started wandering the campus in “dumb agony,” according to the Stanford Alumnus, predecessor of Stanford. But one sight produced smiles: the marble statue of 19th-century scientist Louis Agassiz had fallen headfirst into the pavement from its perch on the front of the Quad, leading to the quip that “Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.”
Before long, throngs from neighboring towns came to gawk, and some to plunder. One person was caught trying to steal the face of Christ from the rose window in the fallen façade of Memorial Church. Rumors spread that thugs from the City were on their way down the Peninsula to loot and murder and that inmates from the decimated state-operated Agnews Insane Asylum near San Jose were running wild. (In fact, more than 100 died at Agnews.) Men were sent to protect women’s residences, the Quad, the museum and other buildings.
At first, Jordan said classes would resume on Friday, but after consulting the faculty he suspended classes until fall semester. Some students lacked money for train fares home; rumors that the University would provide loans proved untrue. Stanford’s financial assets were safe in San Francisco and New York, but the treasurer had no cash on campus. Banks in the region were closed, and Wells Fargo and Western Union offices in Palo Alto had no available cash, even if relatives wanted to wire transfers. Jordan suggested that students take trains from San Jose to Stockton or Sacramento, where they could wire home for travel money. They also were welcome to stay on campus, he added.
The Daily Palo Alto published special editions on April 18, 19 and 20. The Quad yearbook, nearing completion on printing presses in San Francisco, was destroyed in the fire, which also consumed the April 1906 Stanford Alumnus, as well as its mailing list. Editors devoted the May Alumnus to extensive coverage of the disaster, and asked alumni “throughout the country [to] help correct the mistaken impression that Stanford is in ruins.” In his history of the University’s first 25 years, Stanford registrar Orrin Leslie Elliott noted that the earthquake was, in retrospect, only an “incident.” Aided by Jordan’s optimism, according to eyewitness Elliott, the University adapted itself “with surprising quickness and with an agility and light-heartedness happy to see.”
—KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, '71
