Last week my great grand-daughter, Abby, now 11 years old, emailed me saying she was assigned a project at school to write about someone living in the 1930's and wondered if I would write a little article about it and send it to her. This is what I wrote:
I lived on a farm in the 1930's. The country was in a depression when many people were out of work & were very poor. Living on a farm was better as we always had plenty to eat--my mother had a big garden so we always had fresh vegetables. She canned a lot in the summer so we had lots to eat in the winter also. We had cows, horses, pigs, & chickens. We would go to town in a wagon drawn by two horses & my parents would take eggs & cream & trade them for cheese, flour, coffee, sugar & other staples that we couldn't grow. We kids always got a nickel to buy an ice cream cone.
My mother churned her own butter. It was a glass churn with wooden paddles that turned. It took about an hour to get butter. We did not get fruit like bananas & oranges, but we had apples & plums from our own trees. At Christmas we would always get an orange in our stocking--what a treat that was! My mother made candy for us on special days. She baked cookies, cake, pies & bread so we had plenty of sweets.
I went to school in a one room schoolhouse with one teacher for all grades. There were about 15 pupils in 8 different grades. I walked to school -about 2 miles - & carried my lunch in a tin bucket. Lunch was usually a peanut butter sandwich & cookies.
3 comments:
This is a wonderful gift. Thank you so much for sharing it.
My dad (not alive in the 30's) tells me he never realized they were "poor", because living on a farm, they always had plenty to eat. To him, poor people didn't have enough food.
That has always influenced my thinking about how much I am truly blessed.
From Aunt Ginny:
Liz, I really enjoyed reading your Blog about growing up in the 30s, the Great Depression era. I'm sure that Dorothy, being a teenager, would have had a lot different experiences than we did. I only remember good times, we always had plenty to eat. It was always a lot of fun to be able to play in the woods, the swampy area, go wading in the ponds, etc. I guess it was a time of innocence for me. I could almost wish that my grandkids and great grandkids could have the same life, not all of the fears that surround us now. We always had dogs and cats and plenty of farm animals. I can't remember even having a doll until I won one in a radio contest when I was in 4th grade. I guess that I didn't know that I was missing anything, no TV telling me of everything I needed to have. We always had books around to read though, usually from our local library.
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Dorothy was my mother. She was eldest sister of my Aunt Liz and Aunt Ginny.
Thank you so much for sharing this story. I forget how things have changed in such a short time.
WOW!
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