It was called “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929.  The news we got on our battery-powered Atwater-Kent radio that night was most disturbing – the Wall Street stock market had crashed and triggered the Great Depression. Many banks already had closed, causing great concern for our future. I was in my first year of high school in Brattleboro, Vermont, and first heard the news of the crash when I arrived home from school on my bicycle.  This was before rural electrification had come to our little town of Guilford, so our news was obtained by that little battery-powered radio.

I remember well those days of “doom and gloom,” but I do not remember feeling depressed, as we lived on a farm and had the luxury of homegrown vegetables and fruit.  We also had cows, chickens, and pigs, all of which gave us an ample food supply.  Grain to feed the animals became scarce and very expensive, as this was also the time of the Great Dust Storms in the west, which ruined the grain crops.  Crop prices fell by 60% and caused hundreds of farmers to go bankrupt.  It was said that the industries hardest hit were farming, logging, and mining. We had to adjust to doing without certain luxuries and find ways to conserve such as patching worn-out clothes and then patching the patches.  In the summertime, I worked on town highways at 25¢ an hour, which enabled us to pay the taxes and buy needed items we could not raise.  Potatoes were $2.00 a bushel then, and strawberries were 50¢ a quart.  My mother and I would cut ferns in the woods and sell them to a local florist for 2½¢ per bunch of 25.  During those years I rode my bicycle to high school, the seven miles from Guilford to Brattleboro.  I obtained my driver’s license in August of 1930 and then drove to school since only my tuition was paid for by the town.  I carried four others for a dollar per week for gas.

Herbert Hoover was president at this time and conditions steadily worsened. Banks, stores, and factories closed and the collapse continued until it bottomed out in March of ’33, the year I graduated.  This was the year FDR was inaugurated and soon declared a 5-day national holiday to close banks temporarily.  Our savings, which was in a Brattleboro bank, was somehow taken away leaving only a $5.00 balance.  I still have the bank book showing a balance of that amount.  Over 5,000 banks went out of business from 1929 through 1932, home building dropped by 80%, industrial production fell by nearly 45%, and 13 million people were out of work.  FDR’s recovery program, The New Deal, started the slow recovery.  His first program, CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) put thousands of young men 18 to 23 to work planting thousands of trees on bankrupt and abandoned farms.  Over 3 billion trees were planted nationwide.  Many camps were built to house CCC workers.  [Locally, the 5 Rivers area was formerly a CCC camp.]  Workers were paid $30 per month, and their room and board.  In November 1933 another program was formed called the Works Progress Administration, but was a short-lived program, lasting only until the spring of 1934.  At that time I worked on highways cutting brush from the ditch line back to the bordering stone walls.  This greatly enhanced the beauty of those small country roads.

During those depression years, a typical dinner would be boiled potatoes, salt pork and gravy, cornbread (Johnny Cake), and seasonal vegetables from our garden.  The Johnny Cake also served as a dessert when smothered in maple syrup which we produced.  Tripe (the lining of a cow’s stomach) was an occasional bonus.

The Great Depression ended as nations increased their production of war materials at the start of World War II.  This increased production provided jobs and put large amounts of money back into circulation toward the end of the decade.

Richard J. Thayer – 2009