A Clever Way to Avoid ATM Fees

Mike Harden's uncle found a way to make ends meet during the Great Depression.

Growing up, I knew only that my namesake Uncle Mike did "something in banks."

At 32, I learned that the "something" involved relieving them of their cash assets. He robbed banks from Hunterstown, Ind., to Washington, Pa. The job in Washington cost him a brother when police interrupted their 1930 escapade. Ed went down as the two tried to shoot their way out of town. Mike lived to rob again and to show up occasionally during the Depression to buy clothes and shoes for my mother and her 12 siblings. [Link]

No Cash, But Plenty of Clams to Shell Out

DepressionScrip.com is a website dedicated to the funny money that kept many communities afloat during the Great Depression.

Depression scrip was used during the depression era (1930's) as a substitute for government issued currency. Because of the banks closing temporarily and the lack of physical currency, someone had to come up with another form of currency to keep the economy going and a way for trade to continue. Therefore the old idea of local currency was reborn. Paper, cardboard, wood, metal tokens, leather, clam shells and even parchment made from fish skin was used. At one point, the U.S. Government considered issuing a nation wide scrip on a temporary basis.

[via Neatorama]

A Run-of-the-Mill Story

An Alabama woman was able to buy back the iron mill wheel sold to pay for her birth.

Onis and Nena Harrison operated the gristmill in Goodsprings on Alabama 99 in western Limestone County during the Great Depression. They did not have money to pay a Lauderdale County doctor for the birth of their daughter, Nancy, on July 25, 1939.

"My dad sold the wheel for $125 to pay the doctor in Anderson," Nancy Harrison Gaston said.

The wheel remained in Anderson until 1996, when Gaston bought it from an Anderson police officer for $1,000. [Link]

Like a Community Barn-Raising, Only Different

The Mad Trapper of Rat River has been exhumed in Canada's Northwest Territories. A production company hopes to use DNA to finally identify Albert Johnson, "a gun-toting trapper who led the RCMP on the mother-of-all police chases across the Arctic during the depths of the Great Depression."

A film crew exhuming the body of the legendary outlaw in an effort to finally identify him had to dig two holes to find him — and wound up relying on the memory of a 92-year-old woman to successfully get DNA samples.

"We thought he was going to evade us one last time," Carrie Gour of Myth Merchant Films said Wednesday of the Alberta-based film company’s attempt to find an answer to one of the North’s great enduring mysteries.

Far from a macabre, horror-movie ambience, Gour described the exhumation as "magical."

"It was like a community barn-raising — only different." [Link]

A Town Poorly Planned for the Poor

Arthurdale, West Virginia, has a peculiar history. It was America's first New Deal Homestead—a community designed by the federal government under the watchful eye of Eleanor Roosevelt. Like so many other projects planned in Washington, it quickly went over budget.

The pre-fabricated houses, even when it was known that they were unsuitable for West Virginia winter and wouldn't fit their foundations, were still built but then torn to pieces and remodeled. An article in the August 1934 Saturday Evening Post speaks of how chimneys were built eight feet away from their houses' sides, after which the houses were reconstructed to meet the chimneys.

165 homes would eventually be erected (160 of which still stand), to be inhabited by poor folks willing to have their daily lives micromanaged by politicians.

The "colonists" — or "homesteaders" as the press and politicians often referred to them — were the lucky few selected from among the indigent coal miners by the screening process. If they thought they were getting "relief" they would have been correct, but they were getting a bit more in the bargain, too. They were to be resettled, fed, clothed, and housed by order of the politicians, and in addition they were to live on a stage set. Knowingly or not, they were a propaganda piece.

The location of Arthurdale—far from transportation and markets and therefore unattractive to industry—doomed the project. The social experiment ended in 1948, and the properties were sold off to the homesteaders for as low as $750.

Today the town has a wonderful museum that keeps the memory of her beginnings alive, and every year the residents, many descendants of the original settlers, play host to the New Deal festival.

I wonder if it was Eleanor who came up with the imaginative names for Arthurdale's roads.

[Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-001050-C DLC]

The Face of the Great Depression

Perhaps the most famous and haunting photograph from the Great Depression was Dorothea Lange's 1936 "Migrant Mother." Lange identified her subject only as "a 32 year old mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."

Fast-forward to the late 1970s, when the migrant mother herself, Florence Owens Thompson, came forward in an AP article titled "Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo."

Thompson had written a letter to the editor of her local newspaper expressing her disdain for the image.

In the AP story, Thompson declared that she felt "exploited" by Lange’s portrait. "I wish she hadn’t taken my picture," she declared. "I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did." The photo had become yet another cross for Thompson to bear in a lifetime of hardships. [Link, via Kottke.org]

Ironically, Thompson was not a Depression-era migrant to California: she'd been there since 1926. She died in 1983 and was buried in Empire, California, beneath a gravestone that reads: "Migrant Mother–A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood."

The Great, Colorful Depression

From The Washington (D.C.) Post:

Library of Congress to Show Rare Photos

By CARL HARTMAN
The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 13, 2005; 7:18 AM

WASHINGTON -- For those too young to have lived through them, it can feel like the Depression and World War II happened in black and white.

So the brilliance in a trove of rarely seen color photographs of the era are startling: a female railroad worker sports a red kerchief and matching nail polish, a seaside town is framed in a range of blues, factory rows of B-25 bombers sprout like yellow corn.

[snip]

The Library of Congress holds 1,600 color images covering both periods, and it's exhibiting 70 of them as digital prints at the Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the Capitol, through Jan. 21.

All of the color photos — as well as more than 160,000 black-and-white images of the period — can be viewed on the library's Web site....

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

tags: genealogy, family history, family tree