Struggling to Grow Food and Find Work During the Great Depression

Reader Contribution by The Mother Earth News Editors
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These stories are from Victor Swann, submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear. The stories were passed to him by his grandfather, C. Murray, and depict challenges for children during the Great Depression and how the experiences shaped him.

We had a farm. It wasn’t large, but we were surrounded by unused, unwanted, and some repossessed property so it seemed larger than it was. Arkansas was hit hard by the depression and there wasn’t any money anywhere. My family had been poor a long time, and all our neighbors were poor, so we didn’t know the difference growing up. 

I was next to youngest of four boys and two girls. I wasn’t school aged yet in 1928 and I helped my father pick and chop cotton on a nearby farm for a few nickles a day. To get work during the Great Depression you walked to the farm where you were surrounded by hundreds of men, hands waving in the air to get picked. My father was a very strong man. He could push his way to the front of the crowd where the man on the podium would point at him. He was picked a lot. With the money we made, we bought things we couldn’t grow.

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