On Oct. 18, 1929, the ailing stock market started to slide. Years of low and stagnant wages in the midst of a top-heavy economic expansion, a struggling farm sector, and an overall poor global economy combined with other forces to pull the plug on the Roaring Twenties.
The slide became a plummet on Oct. 24, called ‘Black Thursday.’ The plummet became a freefall on ‘Black Monday’ which became a crash on ‘Black Tuesday,’ Oct. 29.
I can’t see evidence that Surry County much noticed.
Local farmers, with several bad years under their belts, were still on a high from the “first annual” county fair in September. One bright spot for them was that tobacco hit an all-time high of $18.09 a hundred weight.
Elkin citizens were organizing a hospital. Mount Airy was working on a library and had just issued a $35,000 school bond. Health officers in several area counties were powering a campaign to get children immunized against diseases such as smallpox and diphtheria to stave off the nearly annual outbreaks.
There were economic troubles in Surry County but they were largely among the farmers who, after years of drought conditions and outdated land-management practices were fighting a losing battle with depleted soil that resulted in poorer harvests year on year.
By October of 1932, as the political campaigns heated up between President Herbert Hoover and New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, unemployment nationwide was 30%. Locally the numbers weren’t as bad but there was still great need.
Newly appointed Surry Health Officer Dr. T.C. Britt conducted a survey of 2,880 elementary school children. He found that an average of 10% of the students in Elkin, Mount Airy, and Pilot Mountain, the three largest towns in the county, were underweight. Rural schools fared worse with as many as 24% in some schools being underweight.
Britt was concerned the undernourished condition of so many children would result in worse-than-usual epidemics of the contagious diseases that routinely visited the area; diphtheria, typhus, smallpox, polio, and more. As was usual, the communities came together to address the problem, each giving what they could to help.
Mrs. T.C. Britt was a member of the Mount Airy School’s Parent Teacher Association. She coordinated a school lunch program with funds from the Red Cross and gifts from local people and businesses. Five grocers in town provided the meat for soup that the high school home economics department prepared. That winter the program fed 171 students at the Rockford and North Main Street elementary schools.
In a memoir available on the Surry Digital Heritage site, Evola Vernon Hawks’ family history of the Great Depression is archived. Her father, John Rufus Vernon, owned a grocery in Pine Ridge. It went out of business when too many customers couldn’t pay their debt to the store and he moved the family back to the family farm.
“We saw good and bad times,” she recalled. “Neighbor helped neighbor. … [they] would often borrow from each other, sugar, salt, meal, milk, butter, or whatever was needed. But I can’t remember many bad times.”
Norman Webb of Mount Airy, interviewed by the Mount Airy News in 2009, was a World War II veteran who landed on Utah Beach as part of the D-Day invasion. Like many of his comrades, he was part of what we call today the Greatest Generation, people who came of age in the Great Depression. In order to help his family he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) at 16.
“I credit the CCC with giving me the training that helped me survive World War II,” he said at the time. Like everyone, he earned $30 a month, most of which was sent home to the family.
The work was hard, the pay wasn’t great, but the attitude was one of cooperation. A sense that if everyone worked together, the nation would come out of the Great Depression stronger than ever. An attitude summed up by the editor of the Times in 1932 when the county implemented a similar program before Roosevelt was elected.
“The plan of the county relief commission, which is under the able direction of welfare officer John Comer, is to use the fund received from the state relief agency for the purpose of providing employment [rather than direct payments]. One of the most dangerous evils likely to rise [from the current situation] is the loss of pride and personal ambition. …. Jobs where the needy are able to work is the real way out of the depression. [the public works projects might not seem priorities at that time but would create] many enduring things … which our children and grandchildren will continue to enjoy.”
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com