Depression era Orange

Orange County Historical Society members and guests got a taste of history with a "breadline" and an evening of memories and stories of what life was like for Orange residents in the decade following the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. And while refreshments at the March 30 meeting were served with a sense of humor, the narratives and stories about local life during the Great Depression were sobering.
Historical society member John Floyd compared the headlines of today to the news from the 1930s. In the months following that fateful day in 1929, papers reported skyrocketing unemployment, construction and industrial production nosedived to record lows, and banking institutions were dropping like flies. During that dark decade, Floyd read from his notes, the average income for U.S. households plummeted by 40 percent, and nine million Americans saw their savings accounts obliterated as nearly half of all banks went bust.
"Economists' descriptions of economic conditions after the crash of '29…they could have been writing today's newspapers," Floyd said.
National headline news of the 1930s included an ever-rising unemployment rate and front page photos featured families, gaunt, grimy-faced and huddled in Hooverville tent cities. Closer to home, families like Orange resident Carol Couch's grandparents, struggled to continue farming and hold on to land that had been theirs for generations.
Her grandfather left his family's farm for a promising career as a banking industry executive in post WWI Richmond, Couch said. Her grandmother, an Orange County girl, favored a faster paced life than what she found on the family farm near Montford. The two settled easily into metropolitan lifestyle of the city, Couch explained. They bought a house and started a family.
But following the crash of '29, Couch's grandfather lost his bank job. Then they lost their Richmond house, and the children were sent back to live and work on the family farm in Orange.
The hard times had an impact on everyone, but for a farmer, a little land meant there was a garden, or a place to hunt. And that meant you wouldn't starve.
Eventually, the Depression got it's icy grip on the farm, too, and Couch said the 132-acre homestead became too expensive to maintain. To keep food on the table, about 100 acres of the family farm were sold off.
Bill Spieden recalled his family's memories of 1930s Orange, and the tough choices folks who worked the land in those days had to face.
Spieden said his father started a dairy farm in the early part of the decade, when real estate prices were at rock bottom. Times were so tight for folks who were selling, Speiden said, that his father acquired the land for $20 per acre. Only a few years before, during the roaring 20s, Orange County acreage was going for about $120 per acre.
From the days when Frank Walker was a practicing attorney in Orange, he remembered a story one of his clients had told him. Her father, the client said, owned a Model T in the years of the Depression, and used it to drive from his farm to his railroad construction job farm in Orange County. But one fateful day, the automobile conked out just a few yards from the worksite. As the whistle blew, the man jumped from the car and sprinted to arrive at his job on time.
But by the time he got there, Walker explained, another man had been given his job.
According to Walker, some automobile owners found, as incomes dwindled, that the cost of maintaining and servicing cars had become an unaffordable luxury. When the Depression hit, Walker said, some resourceful auto owners converted their cars by removing some parts and installing shafts, into comfortable-and more affordable horse drawn, rubber-tired carts.
"They called them 'Hoover Carts'," Walker said.
Judson Gardner was a boy during the Depression. But his memories of the Bonus Army's camp in Washington, DC are as clear as if he had seen it yesterday.
In 1932, a group of U.S. Army veterans and their families, which eventually grew to include 20,000, descended on Washington and set up encampments to protest the bonuses they'd been promised, but had never received. President Hoover instructed military forces to push the veterans out and disable the encampments.
Eventually the incident escalated to a riot and many were injured by sabers, clubs, bayonets and hurled objects.
Gardner was in Washington in the months before the Bonus Army camps became a scene of violence.
"I was nine years old when I went up to DC to visit cousins," Gardner said. There, he toured the encampments. Folks came from nearby neighborhoods with food for the veterans, he remembered.
Gardner joined the Army in 1943. And even then, he said, "the fellows that had gone into the war in '17, '18 had still not received their bonus. They couldn't get it under three presidents, including FDR."
Richard Sanford said the Depression shortened the school days of Orange County children. Schools dismissed students at 2:30 p.m. to save on operating costs.
Sanford said programs like President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and the work of participants in the Civilian Conservation Corps brought about a few positive changes in Orange-and more in Gordonsville.
"The Town of Orange didn't want to be involved in federal projects," Sanford speculated. "In Orange, people didn't take advantage of it."
A couple of school buildings were expanded in the Town of Orange through New Deal funding, Sanford said. And there were road improvements near the site of the courthouse, but Sanford said he remembers Gordonsville jumping onto the WPA bandwagon far more eagerly than Orange.
"People in Gordonsville almost remade the town," Sanford said. "Gordonsville was hungry. They took advantage of these things."
While researching her family genealogy, Sandy Mullins discovered a Depression-era story about her great-uncle. Struggling to maintain the family's farm, Mullins' relative eagerly accepted a position with local law enforcement.
"He was hired by the Town of Orange to break up hobo camps," Mullins said. "You had people in town riding the rails and desperate. It was tough times."
In today's tough times, Orange has yet to see hobo camps springing up on back roads or hungry, jobless men hopping freight trains seeking at best, a day's work, or at the least, something to eat. But that's not to say it couldn't happen.
Then, as now, Main Street businesses went under and closed, one by one. And newspapers reported in the 1930s, the same as now, wave after wave of layoffs, shutdowns, and downsizings which left a growing percentage of the county's workforce without a job.
And perhaps in another 75 years, there will be a new generation of memories and another crop of stories about how life in Orange County was shaped by the financial crisis of the early 21st century.