There was an earthquake in southern Illinois early this morning. It woke JT up! The rest of us slept through it. The quake was a fault line connected to the famous New Madrid fault (that's where the little square is, to the southwest of the big square measuring today's quake).
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Our family has a tale to tell about the New Madrid quakes of December, 1811, through February, 1812.
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"In 1811-12, a series of quakes along the New Madrid Fault in Missouri, near the border with Tennessee, measured 7.8, 8.0 and 8.1, which is 10 times more intense than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They devastated the sparsely populated area, and reportedly caused the Mississippi River to flow backward for a time." (quoted from this article.)
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A great-great ancestor of my family was traveling with a wagon train from east Tennessee to points west. When the wagon train got to central Tennessee, near the Lebanon area, one of my family members became ill. My family dropped out of the train and the others carried on, to end up in the Reelfoot Lake area. The quakes hit, and Reelfoot Lake was a central part of that disaster. My family never heard from those folks again, leading my ancestors to assume they had died in the quakes.
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So glad that someone got sick!
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In this article, there is lots of information on the New Madrid quakes of 1811-1812. One item quoted is a letter written in 1816 by a gentleman with the surname Bryan. Might be a relative! Dad says probably not...but maybe it is!
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Here's a fun site to check out...The Earthquake Map of the USA, by the US Geological Survey.
1 comment:
I was in an earthquake in Australia... I was not that far from the epicenter... that was scary enough... I will admit that I get a little weird when I am at the airport at LAX... I don't like hanging around there... the big one being overdue
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