Much has been written about the Great Depression – along with the words are indelible images. There are images of Dust Bowl farmers in the Midwest, men working on highways – cutting roads out of a hostile environment. There are men in bread lines hats in hand, women in worn clothing clutching the hands of skinny kids outside of closed banks. There have been books about Kansas and the Depression, Hollywood and the Depression, Banks and the Depression, but not a lot about New England and the Depression. But New England was as hard hit as the rest of the country.
Farmers in New England had already been in a depressed state before the Great Depression began – competition with bigger and better farms in the Midwest, land values dropping, and the sheer difficulty of small farming in rocky New England. Members of my family lived in different parts of New England during the Depression – some in suburban areas, others in more rural places. I remember asking questions of my grandmothers about it – after I stumbled on recipes that seemed incongruous – “Eggless Spice Cake,” “Dandelion Salad,” and “Bread Pudding.” That last one got to me – who would want pudding made out of bread? Now I know, but at the time when Wonder Bread ruled, it seemed a very odd dessert.
I wheedled lots of stories out of my grandparents. They kept chickens – my dad was afraid to kill them, so my great-grandmother would wring their necks and pluck them. My dad was ever admiring of his grandmother’s sang froid. They grew their own vegetables, canned them, made jams and jellies. Clothes were handed down from adult to child, to younger child. My grandmothers were all clever seamstresses – being able to adjust pant legs or take in seams to accommodate the next owner of clothes. Years later when a cousin offered to give my mother some old clothes, my mother turned her down flat. There was never going to be hand-me-downs again.
They also seemed to save everything – egg cartons, rubber bands, Skippy peanut butter jars, free drinking glasses from gas stations, dishes from the movie theatre. Years later when we were cleaning out my parents’ and grandparents’ homes, my brother and I were astonished at the sheer volume of old paint, tools, odds and ends of wood, wallpaper and pillowcases (all beautifully embroidered). There always seemed to be a terrible fear of running out of things – so you never threw anything away. My mother’s mom never learned to drive, but she regaled us with stories about saving a little from the housekeeping money to go to the movies with her sisters and their kids. To get people to go to the movies, theatre owners gave away a different piece of a dish service every week. My grandmother still used the set until she died. And there was no such thing as women not contributing to the household income. My grandmothers took in laundry, babysat, cleaned people’s houses, made soap to sell. It’s hard to imagine doing all they did without things like dishwashers or fancy washing machines and dryers.
My husband’s grandmother was even more inventive. A widow with five children during the Depression she took in laundry and made her own moonshine. I learned about this on a shopping expedition with my mother-in-law. She saw a can of Blue Ribbon molasses on our excursion and shared the delightful story of her mother using it to make liquor. When buyers came to call, she’d send one of the kids out in the woods to retrieve a jug and deposit it with her customer. She was an exceedingly resourceful woman who managed to keep her home and all her kids fed and clothed.
All those amazing grandmothers and grandfathers of mine are gone now. But their stories resonate with me still – whenever I see an old movie like “Frankenstein”, serve a salad on those movie theatre plates (I still have them), or hear an old song like “Good Night, Irene.”
J. Gardner Hurd 