The Great Galveston Disaster: Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Including Vivid Descriptions of the Hurricane and Terrible Rush of Waters; Immense Destruction of Dwellings, Business Houses, Churches, and Loss of Thousands of Human Lives; Thrilling Tales of Heroic Deeds; Panic-Stricken Multitudes and Heart-Rending Scenes of Agony; Frantic Efforts to Escape a Horrible Fate; Separation of Loved Ones, etc., etc.; Narrow Escapes from the Jaws of De
John Stuart Mill · en
“Galveston may again become the prosperous port it was five days ago,
but its principal population will be of people who have not seen the
awful work of wind and water. Men who have large business interests here
may remain, but their families will be on the mainland, and every sign
of approaching storm will drive thousands away. A workingman who paid
$3,900 for a cottage and lot offered to sell for $500 yesterday,
throwing in all the house contained. The house is very little damaged,
but he lost a wife and baby whom he had taken to what he thought was a
place of safety. It is impossible to write anything that would convey a
faint idea of the wreckage and ruin.
FIRES ALL OVER THE CITY.
“The number of dead under debris in the central parts of the city will
never be known, as burning is going on all over the city. The east end,
beginning at Fifteenth street and Avenue L, running on a line parallel
with the island, has a great mass of wreckage piled as high as a man’s
head and from that to the top of houses three stories high.
“This line extends as far along as there were any houses to wreck, and
consists of all manner of buildings. It is a desolate scene from Eighth
street east, when one compares it with the life that was present there
but a short time ago. Two buildings of all the colony at the Point are
left standing. These are the houses of the quarantine officer and the
lighthouse. The quarantine warehouse is gone. All the barrack buildings
and the dirt mounds that surrounded them are gone, and in place of all
is a watery waste, with the exception of a few little islands that
appear above the water.
“The water has cut into the lands from the jetties, covering all the
ground practically from Seventh street east. For a block or more in the
neighborhood of the hospitals there is a prairie waste, and then begins
the mass of debris. One man had several houses out there and now he can
find his fine porcelain tubs in the debris, while all about him are the
things that composed his home and the houses he owned.
“Lucas Terrace, a large three-story brick building, divided into flats
of three and four rooms each is almost a total wreck. Out of
thirty-seven persons reported to have been in the building when the
storm started its work of destruction, the Terrace had fifteen killed.
Business concerns of the larger order in the East end suffered with the
corner groceries and the smaller merchants.
WELL-KNOWN BUILDINGS DAMAGED.