It was but the experience of a moment, but those who went through it will remember the awful sight to their dying day

My second great-grandfather was Washington Price Bayless (1812-188) with a remarkable life. His first marriage was to Sarah Jane Baker (1821-1850) who died at twenty-nine. His mother-in-law was Annie Sanders Baker (1792-1890) with her own remarkable stories. Such as this, captured by her daughter Elizabeth Jane Baker Wright in 1890.

Mrs. Baker was the widow of James Baker, and was born on May 7, 1792, in North Carolina. Her father, Joseph Sanders, moved to the village of Nashville when she was scarcely 10 years old. They started from North Carolina in a one-horse cart, but before they had crossed the Great Smoky Mountains, the cart was exchanged for a horse; consequently the home-seekers were put to the necessity of packing their scanty belongings on the backs of two animals and accomplishing the rest of the journey on foot. They settled and lived in this vicinity for several years, but the restless, adventurous spirit of the hardy backwoodsman soon had them again on the march and their next halt was in Stewart County, on the lower Cumberland. There it was that Mrs. Baker married, at the age of 19, in the year 1811.

During the first year of married life, her husband and father, with a Benton family and an Armstrong family determined to try the lower Mississippi County, and accordingly built themselves three huge flatboats in which to make the trip. Their objective point was Natchez, MS. The Benton family had moved into their boat and their companions were on the eve of following them when the great earthquake of 1811 occurred. The boat and it's unfortunate passengers were swallowed in a maelstrom created by the rotary motion of the earthquake. It was but the experience of a moment, but those who went through it will remember the awful sight to their dying day.

The waters quickly resumed their accustomed tranquility, but nothing was ever seen or heard of the Benton family again. Not even a vestige of the boats came to surface. This earthquake greatly changed the topography of this country lying about the confluence of the Tennessee, Cumberland and Ohio Rivers with the great Mississippi river. On that occasion the famous Reelfoot Lake was formed.

Fascinating. I have long known of the New Madrid Earthquakes.

The 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes were an intense intraplate earthquake series beginning with an initial earthquake of moment magnitude 7.5–7.9 on December 16, 1811, followed by a moment magnitude 7.4 aftershock on the same day. They remain the most powerful earthquakes to hit the contiguous United States east of the Rocky Mountains in recorded history. They, as well as the seismic zone of their occurrence, were named for the Mississippi River town of New Madrid, then part of the Louisiana Territory, now within the US state of Missouri.

Actually I am not certain I knew that it was a cluster of earthquakes over two months. I thought it was a single earthquake.

I first came across the story of the New Madrid Earthquake in a childhood magazine, World of Wonder, which had a brilliant mix of science, history, humor, adventure, and literary stories. I was probably about twelve when I read of it and my imagination was seized by the idea of this handful of pioneers, out on the far edge of the frontier suddenly experiencing a massive earthquake on top of all their other struggles. Famously, the earthquake caused the Mississippi to temporarily run backwards, ie. to the north.

Abstract history becomes so much more concrete when you put it into family terms such as Annie Sanders Baker's direct experience of the earthquake and how it changed the direction of their lives. The thought to head down the Mississippi was abandoned and they settled down in Tennessee. Abandoned, but only for a generation. The ineluctable move westwards resumed in the next generation.