M A S T E R P A G E
The Mississippi River bank, on which the village of Point Pleasant was situated, collapsed during the January 23 event.
Fortunately, the residents had all evacuated the site prior to that catastrophe so that none were injured. The town, however,
was lost forever.
The January 23 event also caused several huge sand boils in Tennessee that created a dam across Reelfoot Creek. This
created “Reelfoot Lake.”
On February 7, 1812, came the largest quake of all. At about 3:15 in the morning the region was rocked by an 8.8 magnitude
shock. Outside of Alaska, that is the largest earthquake in American history and one of the largest in the world.
This is the quake that caused the Mississippi River to run backwards. It caused such towering waves of water to be thrown
over the banks that thousands of acres of trees were shattered into splinters and stumps. It threw boats up on dry land along
St. John’s Bayou at New Madrid. And it created two temporary waterfalls. These falls had a vertical drop of about six feet
(2 m) followed by a mile (2 km) or so of shallow rapids.
During the largest of the New Madrid earthquakes, the river is said to have boiled, whirled, and heaved with massive waves
bashing from one bank to the other, sweeping boats and debris into oblivion. Some eyewitnesses from the banks said they
actually saw the river open up in yawning chasms, into which the swirling waters disappeared, drawing hapless flat boats
and their passengers into the maelstrom, never to be seen again. Others said water spouts would shoot upwards from the
waters surface, like tall fountains.
The earthquakes had literally destroyed the landscape with sand deposits, crevasses, and permanent flooding. Most residents
of the region abandoned their properties and moved away. The boot-heel portion of Missouri was nicknamed “Swampeast
Missouri” sometime after the quakes.
Two More Towns Gone Forever
The February 7 quake destroyed two other towns, wiping them forever from the face of the earth. One was Fort Jefferson,
Kentucky, swept away by landslides. These slumps are still visible today along Highway 51 leading into Wickliffe. The
other lost town was New Madrid itself. What was left of the settlement slumped downward 15-20 feet (5-10 m) into the
water’s edge and was washed away by the spring floods of 1812.
The throbs and throes of terra firma wrought by the Great New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12 trouble us no more. Though
the motions of these gargantuan ground vibrations ceased in 1812, their impact goes on. Permanent traces of their violence
lie scattered over a 5,000 square mile (12,000 sq km) area spanning five states.
Note:
This account was adapted with only minor changes from Fuller, Myron L.,
The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-
1812
,
A Scientific Factual Field Account,
USGS Bulletin 494, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912;
reprinted by Southwestern Missouri University Center for Earthquake Studies, 1990. Please keep in mind that the numerical
Richter magnitudes quoted in this book were not determined by instrumental measurements as they are today, because these
events predated the invention of reliable seismographs.
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