From President John Quincy Adams’s diary, dated March 9, 1828 "There was this Evening the shock of an Earthquake– the first which I ever distinctly noticed at the moment when it happened– I was entering in this book, when the table began to shake under my hand, and the floor under my feet. The window shutters rattled,  as if shoken by the wind and there was a momentary sensation as of the heaving of a ship on the waves. It continued about two minutes and then ceased– It was about eleven at night– I immediately left writing, and went to my bed chamber, where my wife in bed, much alarmed, having felt the shock, without knowing what it was. It had no further consequences.”

This 1828 earthquake, centered in southwestern Virginia, was felt over an area of 565,000 square kilometers, from Pennsylvania to South Carolina.

(See my previous post on Robert R. Livingston’s response to a New York earthquake, below.)