Abundance Through Farming During The Great Depression

Reader Contribution by The Mother Earth News Editors
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This story is from Donna L. Pellegrin, as told to her by Erma Lee Oliver Pellegrin and submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear.

Nothing Went to Waste
Whenever my mother hears John Denver’s famous lyrics, “Country Roads take me home,” it brings up vivid pictures in her mind of the 40-acre farm in Viropa, West Virginia, where she and her family not only survived the Great Depression but flourished through it. My mother, Erma Lee Oliver Pellegrin, the youngest of ten children, was born on the farm in 1930. She is the last surviving member of the Oliver family. She looks back on the farm with a sense of nostalgic pride. “My father had a gift.” she recalls, “He could grow anything.” And indeed he did.

My grandfather, Jim Oliver, once known as Giovanni Battista Oliverio, was an Italian immigrant. He spent his youth doing farm work on the rocky hillsides of Calabria where a day’s wages might be a tub of ricotta cheese. When my grandfather’s work ethic and knowhow met the fertile soil of West Virginia, the land produced in abundance, “pressed down, shaken together and running over,” as in Luke 6:38.

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