Episode 11. Jeff Grunwald on the New Madrid Earthquakes

Early in the morning of December 16, 1811, residents of New Madrid, Missouri were literally shaken out of their beds. One of the largest earthquakes in United States history shocked and disoriented residents of the busy frontier town. For several weeks, earthquakes continued to tremble and terrify folks and, in the process, rearrange the land and reshape the Mississippi River. In this episode, I talk with Jeff Grunwald, the administrator of the New Madrid Historical Museum, about those earthquakes, what it was like to live through them, and their legacy on the area around New Madrid. In the Mississippi Minute, I talk about Bubbleland, the geographic oddity on the other side of the Mississippi from New Madrid.

Find more information on the New Madrid Historical Museum at newmadridmuseum.com.

If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider showing your support by making a one-time contribution or by supporting as a regular contributor through Patreon. Every dollar you contribute makes it possible for me to continue sharing stories about America’s Greatest River.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

earthquakes, new madrid, people, river, quakes, area, town, land, mississippi, missouri, kentucky, flooding, mississippi river, tennessee, prairie, moving, shaking, called, folks, part

SPEAKERS

Jeff Grunwald, Dean Klinkenberg

Jeff Grunwald 00:00

So these are some of the largest earthquakes in American history, occurring within about 10 hours of one another in a very, very remote part of the United States.

Dean Klinkenberg 00:27

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg. And I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.

Dean Klinkenberg 00:58

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. On the morning of December 16, 1811, a major earthquake rattled the ground of New Madrid, Missouri and the surrounding area. George Crist wrote about that morning, “you could not hold on to nothing. Neither man or woman was strong enough. The shaking would knock you loose like knocking hickory nuts out of a tree. None of us was killed. We was all banged up and some of us knocked out for awhile and blood was everywhere. Everybody is scared to death.” That quake was the first of many that would shake the area around New Madrid and the quakes were strong enough to be felt over almost half of the country. In this episode, I talked with Jeff Grunwald, who’s the administrator of the New Madrid Historical Museum, about those quakes in 1811 and 1812. We talk about the impact they had on the area. Who was affected. How they affected the Mississippi River and a lot more. It’s a really engaging discussion. I apologize a little bit in advance, the audio for my portion is not great. It’s not ideal. So fortunately, he’s doing most of the talking, so it should be fine. A quick shout out to all the Patreon supporters but especially to those who are new supporters or who have recently increased their pledge, including Peggy Nehman and Michael Anderson. Thank you so much. Now, let’s get on to the interview.

Dean Klinkenberg 02:40

Most of us probably don’t realize that some of the largest earthquakes in American history did not happen in California, but rather in the middle of the country. And I’m so excited today to be here with Jeff Grunwald, the administrator of the New Madrid Historical Museum to talk about these amazing series of earthquakes that happened in the early 1800s in middle America, and the impact they had on the people who were trying to eke out a living in what was called the wilderness or the undeveloped part of the country. Jeff, thank you so much for being here and talking with me today.

Jeff Grunwald 03:15

Dean, I’m happy to be here and appreciate you inviting me. So yeah, happy to talk earthquakes.

Dean Klinkenberg 03:22

So let’s do a couple of things right off the bat. Like I know, when people see the name of the town, they probably assume it’s pronounced like people say it in Spain, but actually we’re talking about New MADrid, correct?

Jeff Grunwald 03:33

New MADrid, yes. New MADrid, Missouri, yes. Spelled like Madrid, prounounced funny, though. You know, the southern tip Illinois isn’t too far from here, and they’ve got a town that looks an awful like it should be called Cairo. They call it Kay-roh. Southwest, there’s a Hayti that we call Hey-TIE, and then a little bit further down the road, there’s a Blytheville that’s Bly-uh-vul. So you know.

Dean Klinkenberg 03:58

Right? And there’s another town in southwest Missouri, named after the French palace that we call Versails.

Jeff Grunwald 04:06

Yes, one in Kentucky as well like Versails.

Dean Klinkenberg 04:09

So when you’re in the Midwest, it’s a good idea to ask how things are pronounced, because you just never know.

Jeff Grunwald 04:17

No you don’t. Dez Planes, Illinois does my folks in Des Moines great. Well, we could do a separte episode on local names and how they are pronounced.

Dean Klinkenberg 04:28

I think that’s a great idea. Maybe that’s a whole nother segment sometime. Well, let’s set the stage for this a little bit. So the earthquakes that happened in 1811, 1812. Tell us a little bit about what the communities were like in New Madrid. I think Little Prairie was another town nearby. What were those communities like before the earthquakes hit?

Jeff Grunwald 04:50

Well, New Madrid had been founded in the 1780s. Originally there was a French trading post there. It was called “L’Anse a la Graise” which is “cove of grease” or “cove of fat”, named that because there was a large amount of bear grease that was being harvested from the area. There was a lot of wildlife. The town actually ended up being founded by a gentleman named George Morgan out of Philadelphia, under the aegis of Spain. He struck a deal with the Spanish ambassador in Spain, whose name was de Gardoqui. Diego de Gardoqui, actually, and he was going to bring American settlers over and found a Spanish town, just south of the mouth of the Ohio River. He brought 70 People with him. They sailed down the Ohio River and formed the town in 1789 as New Madrid, “Nuevo Madrid”. This was to, to earn I guess, some points with the Spanish governor, who he was going to, to meet in New Orleans. He met a gentleman his name was Don Esteban Míro. And Míro had different ideas about New Madrid than de Gardoqui did and that Morgan did as well. And so Morgan thought he was going to be the commandant of the town and was going to profit from land sales. Very reasonable land sales that he would profit from those. They were currently giving away land for free. So they didn’t really like Morgan’s idea of selling land. And if he wasn’t going to be able to sell land, it was going to be no money in it for him. He was really a land speculator. And then he found that he wasn’t going to be the commandant. He was going to be second in command. So he just took his ball and went home. He went back to Philadelphia directly from New Orleans, never returning again to the town, which he founded. Only 14 of the original 70 people actually ended up staying in New Madrid. But Morgan was advertising this wonderful town that he was founding in broadsheets and newspapers all across the East Coast. So even though he went home, people came and you had several 100 there by the early 1790s. The first school was actually started in 1793 and I think there was, if I’m not mistaken, about 700 people there by the mid 1790s. So New Madrid grew relatively quickly. Built on bluffs, high bluffs above the river at a big bend in the river. So it was an ideal place to found a town. Unfortunately, those bluffs started being eroded almost immediately upon settlement of the of the town, and New Madrid was losing about 100 yards a year to the Mississippi River. So there was, the Spanish built a fort there. Fort Celeste – there’s maps that show it in 1795, I believe. By 1800, it had fell in the river and it had to be abandoned. So New Madrid was fighting nature from the beginning. But they were surrounded by very, very good farmland and ample supply of wildlife, which they could harvest pelts and then also get protein and food. And then the river was a good source of food as well. So New Madrid was moving forward. Even though they were fighting nature at the same time, I believe the population of New Madrid County which is much larger than the New Madrid County we know today, it even included some of extreme Northeast Arkansas. It was at about 3000 in 1810. 3165 was the population.

Dean Klinkenberg 09:07

Yeah, it was kind of a boom town there. And I guess I think people sometimes forget there was a 40 year period of time when the Spanish controlled the Louisiana Territory. After France lost the war to England, they ended up giving or selling the land to Spain, who managed the Louisiana Territory for about 40 years. So when New Madrid was founded, it was under the Spanish government, as you said.

Jeff Grunwald 09:34

That’s exactly right. Yes.

Dean Klinkenberg 09:37

This is why it’s New Madrid instead of New Paris.

Jeff Grunwald 09:42

Right, right, right. It was originally settled by the French and then after the French and Indian War, the the Spanish were given control. And so New Spain was what they were going to call this area in North America actually. The Louisiana Purchase changed all that. France took control of what would become Louisiana or New Spain in 1801, and then sold it back to the US to help fund some of Napoleon’s exploits in Europe. And in 1803, became a part of the United States.

Dean Klinkenberg 10:19

So around the time that New Madrid was founded too, I think there was a community of Shawnee Indians who lived in the area, is that right?

Jeff Grunwald 10:28

That is right. I believe Delaware, Shawnee, and some Kaskaskia Indians were in the area. Most of them had moved actually from the east. So they were not native to the area, but had come throughout the 18th century into Missouri.

Dean Klinkenberg 10:45

And they had some interaction then with the people who were founding or were moving into the community of New Madrid, as I understand there was a fair amount of trade and interaction among folks.

Jeff Grunwald 10:57

Yes, absolutely. And Morgan really had an idyllic, almost utopian sort of view of the town. He wanted to found it with green spaces, freedom of religion, respecting the Native American tribes and their place in the area in what would become Missouri. And you had a lot of trade going on at the time between the Native Americans and the European and the American settlers that were moving there. So you did hear a lot about a lot of fighting between those those two groups at the time. So yes.

Dean Klinkenberg 11:34

And I think if I remember, right, there were some enslaved Africans, too, that were part of that population.

Jeff Grunwald 11:41

Yes, yeah. So it was a small number, but there were were slaves in Missouri. It would become a slave state. You know after the Missouri Compromise, right, as Missouri was admitted to the Union, in 1821, after the Missouri Compromise as a slave state even though it was north of the original boundary of free versus slave state, which was I believe, 43○ 40’ in terms of 34○ 30′, I’m sorry, 34○ 30′.

Dean Klinkenberg 12:07

So there had to be a lot of optimism in this town. Like there were hundreds of people who are moving there, the land was good for farming, it was relatively peaceful. People had to be feeling good about their prospects and there just had to be general optimism about the future.

Jeff Grunwald 12:28

I would say yes. You know, they were again fighting nature, right? The river was taking part of their town every year. Floods were a problem. So it wasn’t idyllic, but it was probably about as good as you were gonna get out on the western frontier in the United States in the first decade of the ’90s. Yeah, I would say things are going pretty well.

Dean Klinkenberg 12:50

So tell us what happened with the first earthquake then.

Jeff Grunwald 12:53

Okay, so December 16, 1811. And this came on on the tail of a comet actually. There was a comet that showed its head, I guess, in the sky in the fall of 1811. Comets tended to be taken as bad omens by people. And you also had the sort of the war clouds were kind of forming as well, you know, the US and Britain would fight again in 1812. So, so not all was ideal. But on the morning of December 16, 1811, around 2am, the world exploded, I guess, is the way I like to describe it. A violent earthquake that struck in what’s now, they think, Northeast Arkansas was the epicenter of the first one. And it was a violent quake. Upended the river, the land, you had the land sunk. It was really, really a violent and overpowering natural disaster that the people were faced with in the middle of the night. That would be followed by two more shocks that day, one later in the morning and one at about noon. These are almost as powerful, these days what you’ll see in terms of magnitude estimates – a mid seven magnitude range for that first one, about seven for the other two. So these are some of the largest earthquakes in American history, occurring within about 10 hours of one another, in a very, very remote part of the United States. Little Prairie you mentioned, which is now Caruthersville, the town of Caruthersville, Missouri is where Lttle Prairie once was. It was basically erased by those earthquakes that day. Little Prairie, mostly by flooding from the river, it was virtually wiped out. The residents of Little Prairie would become instantly become refugees, is what I kind of liked it like to think that they were. Homeless and didn’t know what to do. Ah, and most of them after a couple of days, decided to head north. And so Little Prairie would be consigned to history. The Little Prairie residents would actually head north to New Madrid, and they would arrive on Christmas Eve, actually, about 100 of them. So it was a pretty big group. The folks from New Madrid at this time, a lot of them had already decided that sleeping in their homes was not a great idea. So they had moved into encampments around the town 50 to 100 persons each and they were, they were living and sleeping outside, and they made room for these, these folks from Little Prairie. And that was the December 16 quake.

Dean Klinkenberg 15:45

Can you imagine the journey, Little Prairie to New Madrid at that time? How far of a distance are we talking?

Jeff Grunwald 15:54

About, I would say 45, about 40 miles, something along those lines. They took several days. They encountered cracks and fissures. Some reports are that they felled trees. So they chopped trees down and put those over the fissures so that they could cross them and keep heading north. Some of the details are pretty foggy. You get a lot of the firsthand accounts, sort of combine dates and events and things, I think, because everything was so just so unclear. I think folks probably had a lot of these events kind of mushed up in their minds, and they all kind of got glommed together. But the flight from Little Prairie to New Madrid was a very desperate trip for those folks.

Dean Klinkenberg 16:51

Yeah, I can’t imagine what that experience would be like. You just lost your home to some mishap, you know, I guess they kind of understood what earthquakes were at the time, but they didn’t know why they happened. And then you had to go across this land that’s being torn apart by the earthquakes. You don’t know what’s going to be around the corner. Plus, the the land in much of that area was still pretty swampy. You had cypress swamps and rivers and bayous to ford. That was a heck of a trip.

Jeff Grunwald 17:24

Yeah. And then some of the land had changed. There were lakes where there hadn’t been lakes. The land had dropped in certain areas. So even some of these markers you might have used as like, well, there’s that third tree, we just keep going here, you know, that third tree is gone, you know. So very, very difficult for them to to make that journey, and it would have been very unfamiliar to them as well. Yeah, I’m just thankful that I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to face that situation. And remember, you would have had continual aftershocks and earthquakes, right? So there would have been rumblings. Really, you know there was a gentleman in Louisville, Kentucky, who counted almost 2000 aftershocks. So really almost hourly. So you would have had the land shaking really almost continuously, which would have further undermined your confidence in what you’re walking on? So tough trip. Tough trip.

Dean Klinkenberg 18:25

How do you think people tried to make sense of what was happening?

Jeff Grunwald 18:31

People knew that they were earthquakes; knew what earthquakes were. You know, I think at first it’s really hard to tell, I think really, the main thing they were trying to do at this point was kind of establish some order and figure out what we need to do to kind of keep going. And it was a lot of consternation. You had reports from after that first day that some folks were so fired up they couldn’t sit down. Some folks were shocked into silence. So, you know, I think it was really, you would think after like a hurricane or something like we dealt with down in Florida recently, you know. I think it’s going to be the same kind of feelings, right? What, what now? Except you didn’t have FEMA or SEMA, or any of these agencies that are going to come there and help, you know. So it was really, really wouldn’t have been very good.

Dean Klinkenberg 19:26

So you mentioned the comet that had been seen just before all this happened. Like, I think there were some people who saw that as some sort of divine warning or they blamed the comet and somehow for some reason for causing the earthquakes.

Jeff Grunwald 19:42

Right. And then one thing that they talk about it, everyone all the firsthand accounts talk about, is the earthquakes unleashed a smell. It was a sulfurous smell, right? And so, you know, we associate the smell of sulfur with hell, right? So you know some folks thought hell was being unleashed on earth. And the smell, they think this was a very swampy area. So this was probably the release of gases and things that had been trapped in pockets under the swamps. And that can be a very overpowering smell. There’s also reports of some lights and things of that nature. And you will hear reports of earthquake lights even today. But there’s really no scientific backing, there’s no confirmation or anything like that as well. But there would have been lights, smell and a fog. And so it would have been really, really I think, eerie is a good way to describe it. Right? Terrifying, in other words,to be quite honest,

Dean Klinkenberg 20:42

And I guess like the experience too, you know, when an earthquake hits a place like California, there’s a lot of bedrock around, which can kind of at least short circuit or interrupt those seismic waves. But in southern Missouri, that’s alluvial. You know, sand. This is sand and silt. You know, I don’t know, 20 feet deep or 100 feet deep, or whatever it is. And when the earthquake hits, those waves of seismic wave just roll across the land. I imagine it just felt like you were standing on quicksand a lot of the time when a quake hit.

Jeff Grunwald 21:19

Absolutely, there was actually a report of a gentleman who, in New Madrid on that first day, after the first big quake, he went out to check on some other people after a few hours. And on his way back, the second shock hit, and he said it was very difficult for him to even get back to his house. The ground was moving so much. So I think those firsthand accounts really paint a very good picture now.

Dean Klinkenberg 21:45

Yeah. All right, so we have this first round of quakes in December. The second round of major quakes was in February of 1812.

Jeff Grunwald 21:56

January 23rd, actually, there was another quake that was mid to high seven magnitude. There is not a lot of information about that. It was very, very cold, the Ohio was iced over. So you didn’t have people who were able to get down there. All we know is a woman named Eliza Bryan wrote a letter a couple years after the events talking about it and just saying that that January event was almost as big as the first quake from December 16th. And then, from that period until the last quake, February 7th, they said the ground was moving almost constantly. So this is a period of about two weeks where the ground is just going to be shifting and constantly moving. And what you would see from the first round of quakes with the homes in the New Madrid area, chimneys were destroyed, but the homes typically were still standing. Although people were afraid to live in them. They were still living outside. But the January quake did more damage. And then that February 7th quake, which is generally regarded as the largest, and also thought of as having occurred, the closest to New Madrid – it’s epicenter was the closest of any of the major quakes that hit. It basically flattened everything that was still standing in town. So February 7th, that was the real big one. And that’s the one that was referred to even by locals at the time as the big shock. And that was the one that really, really kind of flattened the town. And then you’ll hear people say that, you know, it was a very bad flood year in 1812, too, because of course it was. So that just kind of did the rest in terms of finishing off what was left to do back there in the spring of 1812.

Dean Klinkenberg 23:47

Wow. So I wonder like, do we have any idea how many people moved away in the immediate aftermath? Like after the December quakes?

Jeff Grunwald 23:56

I don’t know exactly. It was, I would say the majority of them. A lot of folks just tried to leave as quickly as possible. You know, census records and information show the population had halved by 1820. This is New Madrid County again, not just the immediately battered area. Think of probably more like 15 or 20 counties down here in southeast Missouri. That would have been what is now or that would have been back then what was called the New Madrid County. But it was it was a pretty, pretty quick decrease in population.

Dean Klinkenberg 24:38

Right? Because when you think about it again, like these quakes are happening. So first of all, you have the quakes and people are reluctant to go back to their homes, but it’s also winter.

Jeff Grunwald 24:48

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Dean Klinkenberg 24:50

If you don’t go back to your home. I could see why people would just decide the heck with this. I’m just going somewhere else.

Jeff Grunwald 24:58

Going somewhere else. That’s exactly right. Now another series of earthquakes actually hit in 1812 in Caracas, Venezuela. That killed like 20,000 people actually. The US provided disaster relief for these folks in Caracas, Venezuela, to try and help them. And that led a lot of US congressman to say, hey, you know, we have these big earthquakes here in Missouri too. Why don’t we help some Americans. And so in 1814, a measure was passed to provide disaster relief for those who had survived the New Madrid quakes in the form of land grants. Land grants were given in the Missouri territory in what would become Hannibal and also Kansas City. And of course, when you try to do something nice for people, it’s going to be characterized by massive fraud. Yeah. So you actually have lawsuits around New Madrid land grants for three decades. Someone tried to claim the hot springs in Missouri on a new Madrid land grant. Hot springs in Arkansas, hot springs in Arkansas with a New Madrid land grant.

Dean Klinkenberg 26:06

Wow, so you said try. So maybe that one didn’t quite work out there.

Jeff Grunwald 26:12

Yeah, well, that worked out for the land speculators. Because they would find people who’d been in the New Madrid and they’d offer from 10 cents on the dollar for their their land, right? And then they’d go and they’d get $60, you know, $60 an acre worth or whatever, in terms of land grants. So they would cash it in for a more profitable land. And the folks who had signed that away had no idea. Not not a great disaster relief.

Dean Klinkenberg 26:43

Well, so tell us a little bit about what we know the earthquakes did to the Mississippi.

Jeff Grunwald 26:49

Sure. So the Mississippi was immediately convulsed. It was very difficult. You actually had a waterfalls that were formed. One was upstream from New Madrid and one was downstream from New Madrid. These made it very, very difficult to, to pass. But the river being such a massive body of water with such a huge volume. These waterfalls actually began to erode pretty quickly. Within several weeks, a couple of months, they were navigable. You had islands that were formed. Islands disappeared. There was one island, it was notorious. It was called the Crow’s Nest. It was a pirate island. People don’t know that there were pirates on the Mississippi. And the Crow’s Nest apparently was notorious. It had been for decades, as a place that you needed to avoid. If you were navigating the Mississippi, Crow’s Nest just disappeared. The pirate island just sunk. So the pirates, the pirate problem was taken of. But you had reports from folks who were trying to navigate the rivers shortly after the earthquakes. The riverbanks were the real problem, you had acres of land that were tabbing into the river. Trees were falling. It made it very, very difficult to navigate for a period of time. With these heavy floods we talked about in 1812, cleared out a lot of that. So really, by the end of the spring in 1812, the river was kind of back to business as usual, which is surprising and amazing, but also, I think speaks to the power of the Mississippi River, which is a massive body of water. And if you grow up by it, you just don’t appreciate how big and how powerful that river really is. Especially down south of the Ohio, you know, a lot of people aren’t aware of it. 60 to 70% of the water on the lower Mississippi comes from the Ohio and its tributaries as opposed to the Upper Mississippi. So that’s that’s an interesting tidbit that I always blows my mind. I’m from Iowa, prejudiced towards the upper Mississippi.

Dean Klinkenberg 29:05

Yeah, that’s all right. I lived in Wisconsin for quite a few years in Lacrosse, so I I have a special affection for the upper part of the river too. But the lower river is amazing in its own way, too, and absolutely beautiful.

Jeff Grunwald 29:20

Massive. It’s just so much bigger. There’s only one bridge between us and New Madrid.

Dean Klinkenberg 29:29

Yeah, so at that time, the main way of traveling on the river would have been on flatboats. So these were, you know, boats that were propelled by oars and mostly people were moving goods down river. We know that there were some people in flatboats, who kind of got caught on the river during the quakes, as I recall, right?

Jeff Grunwald 29:49

Yes, yes. And we really don’t know…and a lot of those folks would have perished. We just don’t know how many, but the estimate you typically see are in the hundreds of people that would have would have perished on the river. Now the first steamboat to ever launch on the Mississippi called The New Orleans, had sailed from Pittsburgh in October. And it was actually just south of New Madrid on December 16th when the earthquake hit. So the New Orleans actually experienced the earthquakes, but was able to continue its trip and was able to successfully get to New Orleans. So I think that speaks to the river at least being navigable. It was very difficult because all of their landmarks had changed. So new islands and things. So that was, it was slow going, but I don’t think that’s the thing that steamboat did about three miles an hour anyway. So yeah, wasn’t going real fast.

Dean Klinkenberg 30:48

Right. They were blazing speed down the river at that point. And I kind of remember one story about the New Orleans. I think it was the New Orleans they had tied up to an island overnight and when they got up the next morning after some more tremors, that island was gone.

Jeff Grunwald 31:08

Yes, yes. I’ve heard that same stories. Yeah, yes, that would be a little unsettling. That would be very unsettling. Yeah, here’s an island good place, and then the island is gone.

Dean Klinkenberg 31:19

So you know, people always talk about how the river ran backwards during this earthquake. Can you just say a little bit about that?

Jeff Grunwald 31:27

Absolutely. So the seismic zone, the metric seismic zone that actually is composed of three primary faults. One of them basically starts straight west of New Madrid and it runs southeast into Tennessee, so it splits the river. That fault is what’s known as a reverse fault. Reverse faults are characterized by uplift. So this was on the February 7th earthquake we talked about, so the largest quake, high sevens. They think resulted uplift from that earthquake, they think created kind of a tsunami within the river channel itself. So this would, the only place you would see the river running backwards would have been if you were in New Madrid, Missouri. And that would have been somewhat disconcerting, right, if you get the uplift, shoves that water back, and the way the river is shaped here, we’re actually at the top of a horseshoe shaped bend. So we look across the Mississippi River, we’re looking straight south, which is unique. And so the river actually runs past New Madrid by about five miles, turns and runs downstream north to New Madrid is running straight west past us, and then turns south right past town, but where the river turns and heads north towards New Madrid, a crack developed, as well, they think. And so you had water that was would have poured out of the river into this crack. And it ended up in a sunken area in Tennessee that is now Reelfoot Lake. Reelfoot Lake State Park. Very nice, worth the visit. Its birthday was February 7th 1812. So the birth of Reelfoot they think sort of exacerbated the river running backwards phenomenon that we talked about. It’s interesting, the first gentleman to write a report on the earthquakes, his name was Myron Fuller. He wrote this report in 1912. So a full century after the earthquakes, he’s written for the United States Geological Survey. He thought the river running backwards is a case of mass hysteria. He didn’t think anything could make a river run backwards. But as geologists and seismologist study these faults and how they behaved really, we think something like that kind of happened. So there’s your answer, as far as did the river run backwards? I would say. Yeah, sort of mostly dependent on where you go.

Dean Klinkenberg 33:48

Right, depending on what you mean by flows backwards, right?

Jeff Grunwald 33:52

Exactly like Lake Itaksa in Minnesota did not overflow its banks, right?

Dean Klinkenberg 33:56

St. Louis did not get flooded from the south.

Jeff Grunwald 33:59

Right? Rip water coming from the side.

Dean Klinkenberg 34:04

All right. So it was a mess. So how long, we had this second round of major quakes, late January into February. How long do we think the quakes continued to disrupt the area?

Jeff Grunwald 34:18

You had earthquakes really, there’s anecdotal evidence that there would have been earthquakes really almost into the 1840s to the point that occasional shaking basically was…a visitor reported that they were having a meal in New Madrid and there was some shaking, and the lady said, “Oh, honey, that’s just an earthquake”. So you would have had earthquakes really for several decades. Not daily or not massive ones, but aftershocks. Enough that the people just sort of kind of wrote them off as just just an earthquake, right? You had the population of New Madrid County did not reach pre-earthquake levels until the 1840 census. So 1820-1830 it was still about a third of its size in 1810. And remember, this is as people are moving west en masse too. So people would move to the area,, they just wouldn’t come to New Madrid because they heard of earthquakes. And then kind of that, I guess, maybe a little bad juju. But by 1840, the population would have been almost 4500 in New Madrid County. And really, it was just folks kind of doing what they got to do to get this farm land usable again. To make sure that they’re able to feed their families. Then you still have all the livestock and not livestock, but wild game, fish, things that you can use to eat. So, you know, you had earthquakes really throughout that year. But I think people started moving into their homes again, it seemed like in the spring, late spring, early summer of 1812. People started, like, okay, I’m just gonna go back inside.

Dean Klinkenberg 36:17

Those who were still around? I think it might have been John James Audubon, passed by that area around 1819, 1820 somewhere in that range, and wrote about how abandoned everything seemed that apparently at that time, still a lot of people had not moved back. In fact, even the Shawnee Indians who lived nearby gave up and move to western Missouri.

Jeff Grunwald 36:41

Yes, yes, they moved. Yes, they took that as a sign. And there’s reports, 1818, someone visiting New Madrid called it an insignificant hamlet of 20 log homes. So, you know, wasn’t, it was not booming again. 1819, someone said that New Madrid displayed the most melancholy aspects of decay. So, you know, it didn’t bounce back immediately. And I don’t think we should think of it that way. And even as late as 1846, there wasn’t an inn in town for travelers. There had been a tavern custom house that could have been used for, for travelers that was actually operated by a gentleman named John Ordway, who was on the Lewis and Clark expedition. So he had settled in New Madrid and the earthquakes I think sort of did his family in and they went north up near Commerce (Missouri).

Dean Klinkenberg 37:39

All right. So what are some of the lingering scars on the land that the earthquakes left behind? Are there places that, you mentioned Reelfoot Lake, are there places we can still see today how the earthquakes change the land around there?

Jeff Grunwald 37:55

Around Reelfoot Lake is a real good place to see that. Down in Arkansas, there’s a lake, it’s called Big Lake, that was actually formed by the December 16, 1811 earthquake. Sand blows or sand boils. We haven’t talked about those. They are caused by a side effect of earthquakes and so does liquefaction. Sand blows are very common in this area. Sand blows in just about every field around here. We’re very heavily agricultural still to this day in New Madrid County. And I would say probably every field in the county is going to have a sand blow or sand boil. And you will see some of those, some larger ones, kind of dispersed throughout the area. You got Billy Goat Hill here in town. We call it Billy Goat Hill. It’s a little rise in the land and it is very flat here in New Madrid. But that uplift is from from the 1811 and ’12 earthquakes. The sand blows or sand boils samples were were important to scientists. They become even more so they really thought all of them came from the 1811 and ’12 earthquakes. But as a scientist started to kind of riff around in them they found organic material. They were able to date and realize that some of these were much much older. So they gave evidence of earthquakes, there’s good evidence of earthquakes prior to 1811 and ’12 on the New Madrid seismic zone. So at about 1450, 900 and 300 A.D. And some older ones as well, so the sand blows have been important to us for that reason.

Dean Klinkenberg 39:26

Right? I know that there’s no way to know this for sure, with any high degree of accuracy. But what’s our what is our best guess about the number of people who died in the quakes?

Jeff Grunwald 39:38

I’ve seen I’ve seen numbers from about 300 to about 1500. And there’s just really no way for me to even, I’ve never really kind of focused on pinning that number down just because there’s just a real wide divergence in the estimates you see. I’m not 100% certain. Probably fewer than there would be today.

Dean Klinkenberg 40:03

Yeah, well, you know, I live in St. Louis in an 1899 brick building. I think if we had an earthquake that hit of that magnitude now, I don’t think my building would still be standing.

Jeff Grunwald 40:16

Not doing well. Not doing well. Now we’ve got, I’m in a brick structure here too at the museum, but they’ve got these little iron rods that run through the building, they’re fastened to stars on the outside of them. And that’s our earthquake protection is, is an iron rod that runs the length of the building, and it’s screwed in by a star. I gotta say, there’s six of them now.

Dean Klinkenberg 40:37

Well, there. You’re set then. And so am I, because my building has the same thing.

Jeff Grunwald 40:43

You want everybody prepared for it. If your’e ever in an earthquake – drop, cover and hold on. Get under a heavy table, desk and hold on til the shaking stops. Public service.

Dean Klinkenberg 40:57

Exactly. That’s great advice. I can only remember one time since I’ve been in St. Louis since 1988. I only remember one time when I felt any tremors. It was enough of a shake. And I’m thinking it was 10 or 12 years ago. It was early in the morning, I was still in bed, and I definitely felt a little shaking of the ground. And then found out later that day that there had been a minor tremor along the New Madrid fault. Have you experienced much since you’ve been there?

Jeff Grunwald 41:30

Yeah. We moved…I haven’t lived here. I’m not a native. I moved here 10 years ago. This is my wife’s hometown. She wanted to move home and wanted to stay married so you know, some other advice for you guys out there is you know do what your wife says, you’ll be happier. I think it felt fine since I’ve been here. There will be about 300 to 400 earthquakes per year that hit on the New Madrid seismic zone. I’d say in a typical year about 10 will shake the surface which could be five, could be 25. Three magnitudes is kind of the magic number that it takes to shake the surface though. But the the last one I personally felt would have been about two years ago, and it was a 2.9 actually. So I felt the high two right underneath town. And so it’s been a little quiet in terms of the large what we call big quakes around here. There’s only been three, three magnitude earthquakes in the last 12 months. One was in Missouri, one was in Tennessee, and one was in Arkansas. So there you go, five states have faults that are from the New Madrid seismic zone, and three of them have had earthquakes.

Dean Klinkenberg 42:42

So other than having an earthquake museum, has the earthquake history…do people in New Madrid think much about this? Does it have much of an impact on lives today? Do people dismiss Iben Browning?

Jeff Grunwald 42:58

Well, Browning was a boon for the museum. We sold a lot of T shirts around his prediction. And I gotta be honest, I didn’t know what New Madrid was in 1990. I was I was an undergrad who was busy doing undergrad things other than studying. But really, I would say folks are aware, not overly concerned. We’ve got you know, big ole river that is probably more of a clear and present danger to our everyday existence in terms of flooding. So people are aware and then I would say folks in rural areas are probably a little more self reliant than you would probably be in a metro area. So just in terms of the stuff we have around here, in terms of four wheelers, you know, grain bins and things of that nature. So I would say if there were a big earthquake, we wouldn’t like it, but you know, we’re probably as ready as anywhere here.

Dean Klinkenberg 44:08

So tell us a little bit about the museum.

Jeff Grunwald 44:11

Sure. The New Madrid Historical Museum, we were founded in 1975. We’re pretty small. We’re about 4000 square feet or so. We focus on earthquakes primarily but we’ve got a very nice collection of Mississippian artifacts. You know, the mound builders are the folks who built Cahokia Mounds. Our other large exhibit is on the Civil War. There was some very heavy fighting during the Civil War in 1862 around New Madrid. So it was a critical win for the Union. And those are our three main exhibits. And then I would say the rest of our our exhibits are what you would find in kind of a small town museum. We’ve got a nice antique collection. We focus on agriculture, there’s a nice display on the history of agriculture in New Madrid and we’re open every day. We’re open about 357 days a year, closed around Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and then Easter Sunday. You’ll typically find us here other than that, n9 to 5 Monday to Saturday, noon to 5 on Sundays. December through March we shorten those hours a little bit. It’s 10 to 4, noon to 4. So, but otherwise, we’d love to see you. We do have a small admission fee. It’s five for adults and three for students. And I have a group rate for groups of 10 or more. We’d like you to book in advance.

Dean Klinkenberg 45:35

Awesome. So other than visiting the museum in person, do you have any social media presence at all where people can keep up?

Jeff Grunwald 45:42

We have a Facebook page. The New Madrid Historical Museum is on Facebook. You can follow us there. That’s really all we’re doing in terms of social media. You can always – we have a website, it’s NewMadridMuseum.com, which has some pictures of our exhibits and some information about the museum as well, too

Dean Klinkenberg 46:06

Awesome. Any favorite books about the earthquakes that you would recommend?

Jeff Grunwald 46:12

I would actually. The one I referred to you yesterday in preparing for this podcast. It’s called the “New Madrid Earthquakes”. It’s by a gentleman named James Penick, spelled p-e-n-i-c-k, published late 70s, I believe. There’s another good one that I will typically refer. It’s “The Earthquake America Forgot”. I had to look back on my bookshelf. That is by a gentleman named David Stewart. And it is very, very thorough. It is a thick book. You can reach out to us via our webpage and we can ship those to you if you want.

Dean Klinkenberg 46:51

Jeff, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and the stories.

Jeff Grunwald 46:57

Absolutely, happy to do it Dean. Thank you for recording me. We like talking about earthquakes.

Dean Klinkenberg 47:04

All right. Well, have a great day then.

Jeff Grunwald 47:09

You do the same sir. Thank you very much.

Dean Klinkenberg 47:11

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Dean Klinkenberg 47:34

And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. The discussion I just had with Jeff Grunwald about the earthquakes around New Madrid reminded me of another story from that part of the river. As Jeff mentioned, New Madrid sits along one of the Mississippi’s big meanders, the New Madrid bend or the Kentucky bend if you live on the river’s east bank. That meander and the human desire to draw boundaries created a geographic oddity that we’re still living with today. In the 19th century, as surveyors worked their way west to draw a line separating Tennessee and Kentucky, they were trying to follow a straight line along 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude. This seemed like a pretty straightforward task, but they messed up when they reached the Tennessee River. So the boundary between the states jumps north about 17 miles of the intended line, all the way to Virginia. Not content to make just one mistake, the surveyors failed to notice that their line cut across the Mississippi River meander, and isolated 17 and a half square miles – roughly 11,000 acres, that ended up getting assigned to Kentucky even though it had no land connection to Kentucky at all. Tennessee and Kentucky fought over this outpost for decades, until 1948. Tennessee insisted it was part of its Obion County. The dispute was eventually resolved in Kentucky’s favor, which meant that this little Kentucky outpost would find a home in Fulton County. Geographers call this type of geographic anomaly an exclave where a part of a territory is completely isolated from the rest of that territory. While geographers have a term for the area, settling on a common name has been tougher. It’s been variously called Madrid Bend, Kentucky Bend and Bessie Bend after nearby Bessie, Tennessee. The killjoys at the US Census Department call it West Census County Division. The fun people though call it Bubbleland. Bubblelanders were and still are mostly farmers. At first most people grew corn and wheat but cotton became the dominant crop for the Civil War. Just about every farm that was next to the river had a landing for steamboats and many of them also had wood yards where they sold wood to refuel steamboats. Places like Watson’s Landing, Harris’s Landing, Compromise, Nolan’s Landing, Kentucky Point, Kerrigan’s Flat, Adams Landing, Moss Landing, State Line Landing. There were a whole bunch of them. The narrowest point in the band is just a half mile wide so at one time a steamboat passenger could disembark at the state line on one side of the bend and get a night’s sleep; then board the same steamer when it came around the other side had continued their trip. The population in Bubbleland probably peaked in the late 19th century at just over 300 people, many of whom grew cotton – the sharecroppers. And life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain described the colorful feud between the Darnell and Watson families. He wrote, both families belong to the same church. They lived each side of the line and the church was at a landing called Compromise. Half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee. Changes in agriculture and repeated flooding would eventually take a toll on Bubbleland. In 1937 a levee break flooded the peninsula and left behind blue holes and piles of sand. The area also flooded again in 1912, 1950, ’73, ’78, and ’83. You get the point they had a lot of flooding. The dozen or so remaining residents of Bubbleland might be more isolated today though than they were in the 19th century. New Madrid, Missouri is the closest city but you need a boat to get there and ferry service ended long ago. The only land route into the area is via Tennessee State Road 22. Bubblelanders get there mail through Tiptonville, Tennessee. Cotton has been replaced by corn and soybeans. The nearest grocery store and healthcare facilities are 12 miles away in Tiptonville. To vote, residents have to drive 40 miles to Hickman, Kentucky, passing through Tennessee before re-entering Kentucky. And their children go to school in Lake County, Tennessee. Bubbleland today is a handful of houses, a cemetery, and a few 1000 acres of cultivated land surrounded by tall levees meant to keep that pesky Mississippi River from flooding it again.

Dean Klinkenberg 51:57

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you helped keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series at certain places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.