Santa Barbara Historical Museum Shakes Out Pictures and Videos to Recall 1925 Earthquake
John Palminteri
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Though they didn’t have cell phones and pocket cameras 100 years ago, historical images following the June 29th, 1925 earthquake are on display at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.
While many people were sleeping or just starting their day, the ground shook hard at 6:42 a.m. at the start of a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. Buildings that were not reinforced or strong enough came down. Damage was everywhere.
The museum is recalling this event with numerous shots, panels, videos and the storyline that left much of downtown and several other areas destroyed or heavily damaged.
The twin towers of Mission Santa Barbara collapsed. Many other buildings were in shambles.
“We really wanted to make it a priority to show the public images they might not have seen before,” said Santa Barbara Historical Museum Education Director Emily Alessio. “Every photograph and every artifact in this exhibition tells a story and we are really lucky to have the actual words and voices of earthquake survivors.”
The exhibit goes on to show most of the populace spent the summer sleeping outdoors as aftershocks rolled through the city. Exactly one year later on June 29th, 1926, a sharp aftershock claimed one more life when a collapsing chimney killed a small boy. Over the next decade, the city rebuilt and reinvented itself in the process. Out of the rubble would come a new Santa Barbara with the headline, “Spanish Architecture to Rise from Ruins.”
“One of the main things that we did for the exhibition was to digitize all of our images and do a call out to the community to find more images of the destruction and rebuilding following the quake,” said Executive Director Dacia Harwood.
Some of the projected photos show a before and after view of different intersections. Historian Neal Graffy says, “that’s the fun of it. To come down and look at it and realize ‘I know what that building is’ and see elements of it and others you have no idea .”
It also shows how the city was changed. “This was the opportunity as you look around here, you see all these buildings with fronts, all the bricks caved out, so they could put new fronts on the building.” He said after the earthquake “cities across America were looking at what Santa Barbara was doing and a lot of people did not have an idea of building codes or anything like that so we were a role model.”
Part of the display is an old power switch. It was shut down by a worker to prevent the city from having fires during the catastrophe.
There is also a Chamber of Commerce sign with a crack in it. It was on Carrillo Street the morning of the powerful temblor.
Numerous newspaper headlines and coverage are in the display showing the way the public learned of the disaster. Some of the research shows the names of those who died were in error,
Two of the most famous images of damage were the Hotel Californian and the Old MIssion.
The museum exhibit is free to the public, and is opened through July 6th, 2025.
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