“The people brought their cattle over to our place. We had a canyon out there. The men came and shot all the cattle. Some ranchers were getting 3 cents a pound for their cattle. They couldn’t afford the feed grain. So they shot them, and everybody came to get the meat to can. I covered up my ears so I wouldn’t hear it.”
By the late 1920s, they had diversified into cotton and feed grain as their cattle business dropped. However, it wasn’t enough.
At the western end of the county, Zell Hunt, wife of Maxdale rancher John Hunt Sr., told a similar story. Cattle, swine, sheep and goats were systematically slaughtered during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term.
“The idea was to stabilize the economy and bring the country out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Didn’t work, of course.” she told the authors of “Unforgettable Decade: A Pivotal Era,” compiled in 1993 by the Killeen-Project 1930s.
They tried to save the meat by canning or hanging in storm cellars. Most of it spoiled or was devoured by insects.
“Some of it wasn’t too bad-tasting, but most of it was tough,” Hunt said. “My sister later wrote me that she hoped she never saw another can of meat, but it came in right handy at the time. (My husband) John would never turn anyone away and from time to time we were feeding various families - some of them kinfolk and some were not.”
Although cattle were predominant in the western half of the county, cotton reigned eastward on the Blackland Prairie. Thus, farmers had a love-hate relationship with their cash crop.
W.E. Brightbill, the Temple Daily Telegram’s farm editor, opined, “Do you expect me to boost cotton? I won’t do it. I hate it. All my life I have observed its tragedy. It has broken the farmers, the merchants, the banks and the landlords. Even before it wore out the land you could trace its production by following the lines of illiteracy, penury, tenancy and mortgages.”
Blackland Prairie farmers felt the bust earlier and deeper than other economic enterprises, according to historian Robert Ozment of Temple, author of “Farming in the Blacklands during the Great Depression,” a chapter in “Texas Blackland Prairie: Land, History and Culture” edited by Rebecca Sharpless. Sharpless, former Temple College faculty member, is now assistant professor at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth.
“The real problem lay in the boom and bust conditions which prevailed from 1919 to 1929,” Ozment wrote.
Farm income seesawed with sharp boom-to-bust swings until 1930, when U.S. agriculture bottomed out. Blackland Prairie cotton production was down 70 percent from what it had been in 1923. That equally affected related enterprises - such as ginning, farm equipment, trucking and cattle production.
The Temple Trust Co. early in 1930, bought a series of Temple Daily Telegram ads, boldly blaming farmers for the region’s economic hardships. The trust company accused farmers of hiring too many workers, buying goods they could easily produce and spending too much on “the luxuries of town living.”
Pledging to lend $1.75 million, the company proclaimed, “We do not lend money to liquor drinkers. The day of the deadbeats, rent jumpers and lazy irresponsible borrowers is over for at least one generation.”
A later ad emphatically stated, “It’s time to build roads, go to work, quit whining, pay debts, live simply, face all the facts … The farmer ought to do his own work and stop hiring.”
“Of course, Temple Trust didn’t mention the fact that it was lending money at 100 percent without collateral,” Ozment added in an interview. By 1932, Temple Trust was shuttered, one of four Temple financial institutions to go bankrupt during the 1930s.
Drought and overwhelming floods ruined cotton crops. The U.S. Department of Agriculture advised farmers not to replant and to destroy crops ready for harvest. Thus, 1930 cotton prices hit historic lows.
With cotton prices netting to pennies on the pound, Temple businessmen started their own campaign to generate higher prices, according to Ozment. They started buying cotton bales to hold off the market until prices improved, and many proudly displayed their bales in front of their businesses as a sign of solidarity with farmers. Scott & White Hospital bought 10 bales, but declined to display the bales. Even those symbolic sales failed to stabilize prices.
“Despite the fertility of the Blackland Prairie, many of its people lived in poverty as deep and in circumstances as meager as those described in the Deep South by James Agee and others,” wrote Sharpless in her history “Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms 1900-1940.” “Only a few rural people gained wealth from the land, and most of the truly prosperous lived in the region’s numerous towns.”
Living conditions were rudimentary. Ruby Smith recalls times when she and her mother would scrounge the countryside for edible wild plants and berries to eat. “We had all kinds of greens, wild grapes and the like to eat,” she said. “We couldn’t afford any flour or sugar.”
By 1935, only 2.3 percent of Texas rural counties had electricity. The 1940 federal census reveals that 75.8 percent of rural Bell homes had no electricity. Tenant farms fared worse, with 85.6 percent of white and 97.7 percent African-American tenant farmers having no electricity by the beginning of World War II. By contrast, nearly 100 percent of city dwellers had power.
Parents constantly drilled their maxim to their families: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
However, slogans could not save many children of deprivation. Although state health and death records are somewhat spotty through this period, an estimated 20 percent of white and 25 percent of African-American children died before their teen years - victims of poor nutrition, inadequate health care and disease.
pbenoit@temple-telegram.com
