Back at their homes that Wednesday morning, things were not quite so bad. Many locals worried more about their San Francisco brethren than their own damaged property.

At least two buildings on Hayward's unpaved B Street, the Carnegie Library and the Palmtag Building, lost chunks of their roofs.

Storefront windows broke, and brick chimneys and wooden water tanks toppled throughout Southern Alameda County.

Lena Quain Macey, 35, the assistant postmistress in the village of San Leandro, had just finished dressing by lamplight before 5:15 a.m. when she felt a slight rumble, followed by a "roar like a cannon" and violent shaking.

"The roar continued; I could hear the dishes falling to the floor in the kitchen and wondered how much longer it would last," she wrote sometime later in an account The Daily Review published in 1981.

"When the shaking stopped, I opened my door and looked out," she wrote. "Mother was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, as white as a sheet she was so frightened; the hanging lamp in the dining room was swinging from one side to the other clear up to theceiling; I expected every swing would jump it off the hook, but it didn't."

Only two San Leandro houses had to be condemned after the quake, according to a report released by a state commission in 1908.

On the

Some of the region's most dramatic damage was at the Alameda Sugar Company on the western mudflats of Alvarado, now part of Union City. Wooden tanks, propped atop concrete foundations on the swampy land, tumbled and let loose an estimated million gallons of molasses into the wetlands near Alameda Creek.

For those who remembered the Hayward fault's own "Great Quake" of Oct. 21, 1868, which had demolished many buildings in San Leandro and Hayward, the damage on April 18, 1906, was minimal.

"Much crockery, glassware and bric-a-brac was destroyed, but the whole loss is so trifling as to be not worth mentioning," the Livermore Herald reported a few days after the quake.

The paper encouraged residents of the fertile, sparsely populated valley to send San Francisco its butter and eggs, and be ready to welcome 500 refugees.

Those who sought ferries into San Francisco to search for friends or relatives, or simply to witness the city's carnage, found their voyage blocked because everyone was going the other way. Within a day of the quake, thousands of city dwellers were streaming into the East Bay.

Hayward Mayor Charles W. Meyer promised his town could take care of 1,000 refugees, and he organized a relief committee to send food and clothing.

Diane Curry, an archivist at the Hayward Area Historical Society, said she recently discovered a letter from a Hayward high school principal, John Gamble. Gamble, addressing a military commander in San Francisco, offered to provide shelter for many of the young Chinese girls who were staying at his friend's Presbyterian mission. He feared that if left to fend for themselves in the crippled city, the girls would be inducted into a world of prostitution.

Many refugees gathered at Native Sons hall at the corner of C and Main streets, and some lived for months in tents behind homes. The Hunt's Cannery just west of downtown set aside its seasonal worker cabins for refugee housing.

At least a few members of San Francisco's Ukrainian population reportedly fled to the Hayward hills, where they were housed by the long-bearded priest and Russian fugitive Agapius Honcharenko.

Budd Eber, a former San Leandro Councilman and resident of Callan Avenue, said the 1906 quake was a "turning point" for the area when he spoke to the Daily Review in 1956, just before the disaster's 50th anniversary.

The quake woke him up and he rushed to the town hall on Davis Street, which soon became a temporary home for evacuees.

The electric railway connecting Hayward to Oakland was a chief source of news for the area and a migration route out of San Francisco. Some of the refugees never went back.

"From a sleepy little town of 3,000, we really have grown," Eber said, speaking when his city stood at 46,000 people. "That growth really started by folks from San Francisco realizing how nice it was to live here in San Leandro."

The earthquake inspired some crafty landowners in the shoreline area west of Hayward to conceive a brand new city. Russell City, as it was known then, would become a bustling new post-quake suburb.

Developers subdivided farm land into box lots, dropped down grids of roadway and planted a few trees. But most of the homes were never built and the remnants of Russell City were annexed into Hayward some decades later.

This article is based on information and quotations compiled from Daily Review archives and documents at the Hayward Area Historical Society.

Matt O'Brien can be reached at (510) 293-2473 or mattobrien@dailyreviewonline.com.