City of Heros ~ Richard N. Cote

     At 9:51 PM on August 31, 1886, William Ashmead Courtenay, the much-respected mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, was relaxing aboard the Etruria, an elite Cunard Line luxury liner bound for New York from Liverpool. At that same moment, the most powerful earthquake ever to strike the East Coast rolled through South Carolina and devastated Charleston, killing over 150 people and damaging or destroying over 90% of the historic city's masonry buildings within sixty seconds. Within ten minutes, it had spread its terror throughout half the nation, causing panic and damage as far north as Toronto, east to Long Island, south to Cuba, and west to St. Louis. The nation was stunned. No one in Charleston, or anywhere on the East coast, ever thought such an unthinkable catastrophe of such magnitude could possibly strike east of the Mississippi. They were very, very wrong.      City of Heroes: The Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886, is a riveting, heavily illustrated non-fiction book filled w