The Hanford Sentinel from Hanford, California • 42

Letters From an earthquake By Dick ODonnell Almost eight decades ago, on April 18, 1906, at 5:13 a.m., San Francisco was jolted by an earthquake. There was death and destruction and fire and famine in the city. It was a time for great heroics and kindness. Cruelty and cowardice, too. Celebrated photographer Herman Hoyt, famous for his pictorial studies of California back then, was a victim of the earthquake.

His living quarters were ruined, but he was able to save his cameras and take some remarkable photographs of the aftermath of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history. Hoyt, a native of Gilford, N.H., also wrote a series of letters to his closest relative, Ethel L. George, a cousin who still lived back east in Manchester, N.H. Some selections from those letters follow on the next pages. Family Weekly april 28 is5 9.