The Great Depression in Vermont

by Jennie Shurtleff

The United States has been going through a period of financial uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Commentators often refer back to the year 1929 when discussing our current financial situation, either to highlight similarities or to underscore the differences.

While the story of how the United States fared during the Great Depression has been well documented, the story of Vermont during the Depression years has gotten relatively little attention until recent years. Perhaps that is because of the general impression that Vermonters were not really impacted by the Depression. There is an oft quoted remark - worded in various ways, but the sentiment is the same - that Vermonters lived with such hardship that they didn’t realize when the Depression hit. There is an element of truth to this remark. Many Vermonters were still living on small subsistence farms, and these farmers were quite self-sufficient as they had the means to raise their own food and procure wood that could be used for heat. That said, statistical data suggests that Vermont agriculture did experience a dramatic decline during this period, largely due to outside economic forces. An article entitled Vermont in the Great Depression, 1929, written by Jeff Potash, Gene Sessions, and Michael Sherman, for the Vermont Historical Society, indicates:

“Income from the sale of fluid milk, Vermont’s most important agricultural product, dropped more than half from 1929 to 1933, in some places to 2.67 cents per quart—far less than the cost to the farmer for feed and equipment. The decline in demand for agricultural products that farmers had used to supplement their incomes, such as potatoes and lumber, further reduced agricultural workers’ purchasing power to its lowest level since 1877. Many farmers sold out—more than 1,500 farms went out of business in the decade after the Great Crash of 1929, putting much of the land out of cultivation.”

A 1930s vintage Maytag washing machine with wringer, similar to the one

that my grandmother used

to do laundry for a small hospital during the Depression.

While Vermont’s farmers clearly did suffer, those people living in the state’s urban areas tended to be affected even more dramatically, particularly those working in factories or the stone-related industries. Between 1928 (the year before the stock market crash) and 1933, the number of industrial workers declined by about 45%, from 27,421 to 15,083.  The value of industrial products that were manufactured dropped even more dramatically, about 60%, from $142,522,547 to $56,623,538.

Statistics are only part of the story, which is one reason that the Woodstock History Center collects and preserves oral histories. In the case of my family, my mother often spoke of the Depression. My maternal grandparents were living in the Boston area when the Depression started, but they moved to rural New Hampshire in the early 1930s. Their experience in New Hampshire was probably not unlike that of many Vermonters. Prior to the onset of the Depression, my grandfather had been working as the foreman for a large construction company in Massachusetts. After the stock market crash, he found himself unemployed. The only job that was available was that of a grave digger. He took the job. In the middle of the Depression, he had a heart attack and a series of health complications that led to his being hospitalized in Boston for a number of months. My grandmother, who had been a stay-at-home-mother, provided for the family and paid the medical bills by taking in laundry from a local hospital. She spent her days washing, drying, ironing, and folding linens. When some of her family members were forced to move to new areas in search of jobs, my grandmother temporarily took in their children. Despite her own situation, she never turned anyone away hungry. My mother, who was a small child at the time, remembered that homeless men would frequently stop by their house offering to do work for food. My grandmother would tell them to rake the front yard, or some other small task, while she would throw some bread dough in oil and fry it up for them to eat.

My father’s family, in contrast, was living on a small farm in North Bridgewater, Vermont. When my father recalled the Depression, he mentioned that people didn’t have much money, but his family always had plenty of food. In the middle of the Depression, my paternal grandparents added four additional bedrooms to their house, likely because they, like my mother’s family, temporarily took in cousins when extended family members needed to relocate to find new jobs.

The experience of people leaving their families and having to relocate to find work was not unique to my family. The Great Depression caused many geographical population shifts. One program that was sponsored by the government that led to people temporarily having to leave their families was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This initiative, which was the brainchild of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was designed to get young unemployed men back to work. It not only provided them, and their families, with much needed income, but it also kept them occupied and taught them job skills.

In its short lifetime, from 1933-1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps, employed about 2.5 million young men, many of whom were from urban areas and on relief rolls.  The CCC workers earned $30 each month, with approximately $25 of their earnings being sent home to their families. Some of the well-known conservation projects tackled by the CCC included building parks and dams, fighting fires, and constructing roads. In addition to working on many of these projects in Vermont, the CCC also made invaluable contributions to Vermont’s nascent ski industry. During the Depression, Vermont’s state forester was Perry Merrill. He was a ski enthusiast and the head of the CCC in Vermont. Consequently, he assigned groups of CCC workers to clear ski trails on a number of mountains. These trails became destinations for eager skiers.

The Great Depression is just one of many topics that will be covered in the History Center’s new exhibit, Hindsight 20/20. We look forward to sharing this new exhibit with you in the near future.