by RoAnn Bishop*
" Well somebody told us Wall Street fell
But we were so poor that we couldn't tell.
Cotton was short and the weeds were tall
But Mr. Roosevelt 's a gonna save us all."
— from "Song of the South," written by Bob
McDill about the Great Depression era and
recorded in 1989 by the band Alabama
Hard times hit North Carolina's farmers
before the Great Depression of the
1930s even began. In the 1920s, North
Carolina was still very much a rural
state. Half of its total population lived
on working fanns. Agriculture was its
largest industry. But farmers' income had
declined steadily during the decade because of
overproduction of cash crops, falling crop
prices, rising farm costs, poor conservation
practices, and other problems. When the stock
market crashed on "Black Tuesday" — October
29, 1929 — the hopes and dreams of many farm
families crashed along with it. "Many of our
North Carolina farmers are desperately poor,
live in wretched houses, and are scantily pro¬
vided with even the necessities of life," a soci¬
ologist from the University of North Carolina
wrote in 1929. Throughout the next decade,
both state and federal assistance would be
needed to ease the plight of agriculture.
The biggest problems for North Carolina farm¬
ers resulted from growing too much cotton
and tobacco, the state's two main cash crops.
(Farmers grow a cash crop for sale rather than
for personal food or for feeding livestock.)
During the 1920s, farmers produced more than
buyers needed of these crops, creating a glut
on the market. As a result, tobacco and cotton
prices plummeted. The introduction of new
man-made materials such as rayon, women's
new "flapper" dress styles that required less
fabric, and increased competition from foreign
textile mills combined to topple "King Cotton"
from its throne in the 1920s. In North Carolina,
cotton that had sold for more than 30 cents a
pound in 1919 was selling for less than 6 cents
in 1931. By that same year, prices for tobacco —
which had surpassed cotton as the state's new
"king" crop — had dropped to just 9 cents a
pound, compared to 86 cents in 1919. Many
farmers received less for their crops than it
cost to produce them. Less income meant
farmers could not buy needed farm supplies,
or even food and clothing for their families.
They relied on banks and merchants for more
and more credit. They sank deeper and deeper
into debt.
Fay Toney works his
North Carolina farm
with a plow and mule,
ca. 1930s. Farming was
hard work, with few Tar
Heel farmers able to
afford new machines or
electricity. Image courtesy
of Betty Toney Davis and
Anita Price Davis
To add to farmers' woes, constant cultivation
of cotton and tobacco had damaged soil, rob¬
bing it of nutrients needed for crops to grow
well. Also, farmers who had tried to earn
money by lumbering had stripped the forests
of trees. This meant that rain washed deep gul¬
lies across the land. Such soil erosion left land
unsuitable to grow other crops like grains and
vegetables. As a result, North Carolina had to
import some of its food during the 1930s, even
though it remained a largely rural state with
agriculture as its economic backbone.
Another problem facing Tar Heel farmers was
the downside of farm mechanization, or
replacing human and animal labor with
machines. Technological advances made dur¬
ing World War I led to mass production of
4 RoAnn Bishop is the curator of agriculture, industry , and economic life at the North
Carolina Museum of History.
THfH , Spring 2010
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