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Reflections
Nov. 12, 1933: the day the 'Great, black blizzard' reached Kendall Co. : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisNov. 12, 1933: the day the 'Great, black blizzard' reached Kendall Co.
| by Roger Matile
| 11/29/2012
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As we watched Ken Burns' powerful documentary on the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on PBS recently, I recalled my column in our April 30, 2009 edition. I thought it might be of some interest for those who might have missed it to revisit the local impact that long-ago ecological disaster had right here in Kendall County. If you missed it, I highly recommend catching Burns' documentary on the PBS web site or on Comcast's On Demand service. Here's that column, one more time:
By late 1933, Kendall County farmers were in real trouble.
The price of corn had collapsed to just 14 cents a bushel, less than it cost to haul it from farm to market. And besides, there wasn't a whole lot of corn to sell in the first place. A brutal drought had gripped the Midwest during the summer, wiping out some crops, and seriously damaging the gardens and orchards that provided food for farm families.
Then came the plague of chinch bugs, a voracious living tide moving from field to field, starting with the small grains.
In mid-June, the Kendall County Farm Bureau warned fields should be protected with chinch bug barriers, but most local farmers simply didn't understand what they were facing. By early July, the Kendall County Record reported that: "All the farmer families are talking chinch bugs, which have invaded this area as never before. They ruined much of the wheat and barley and some oats and are now entering the cornfields...Later and more reports are coming in of the destruction of whole fields of small grain and the entering of cornfields by the chinch bug. Perhaps Illinois farm folks never realized before this hot, dry year how much they have had for which to be thankful."
The year also saw a number of strong weather systems that brought sharp temperature changes, drought, and strong winds. On June 10, the thermometer stood at 100 degrees at noon, but within minutes, the wind had swung round to the north and the temperature dropped by 20 degrees.
Despite the wild temperature swings and strong winds, the weather fronts brought little rain, and the drought only deepened. It was hard here in Kendall County, but farther west, on the high plains of the Dakotas and Montana, it was catastrophic. Farmers had been lured to the intermountain west in large numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s during a period of relatively high rainfall. The fragile shortgrass prairie was plowed and planted. But immediately after World War I crippling drought struck. By 1933, conditions were ripe for a disaster, and it came on Veterans Day, 1933.
On Saturday, Nov. 11, a huge windstorm hit South Dakota, sweeping up tons of dust, blotting out the sun. And then it moved east, carrying its load and picking up more as it went. At Manson, in western Iowa, the dust "turned daylight into darkness at 3 p.m."
By Sunday, Nov. 12, the storm and the dust it was carrying reached Kendall County. As the Record reported in their Nov. 15 edition: "The dust storm Sunday night was one of the worst dust storms experienced in this vicinity in many years. It was just too bad for all the good housekeepers who had finished their fall housecleaning. Even in the homes with doors and windows tightly closed the dust-laden air was disagreeable to breathe. The dust is said to have been blown here from as far away as the Dakotas, where a 70-mile-an-hour wind did considerable damage."
From Illinois, the storm, dubbed the "Great Black Blizzard," moved east continuing to pick up and drop dust and blot out the sun all the way to the Atlantic coast.
It wasn't the first dust storm to hit Middle America, but it was the worst-so far. And Hugh Hammond Bennett, who had been appointed the first head of the new Soil Erosion Service on Sept. 19, about a month before the great storm struck lost no time in using the $5 million in emergency employment funds Congress had appropriated to begin badly needed conservation efforts. But too much of the arid high plains had already been stripped of its shortgrass prairie plants.
So the next spring, the general drought and dust storms continued. In early April 1934, a huge storm hit the central U.S. U.S. Weather Bureau Meteorologist W. A. Mattic noted the severity of the Great Black Blizzard, as well as the April storm: "The second of these was on April 9-12, 1934, with dust noted from the Dakotas to Florida."
Frustrated Kendall County housewives and worried farmers again watched the skies darken and the wind pick up. The Record reported on April 25: "Even old timers say they never remember such wind and dust storms as are being experienced this spring. The ditches along some roads are filling up with dirt as they fill with snow in the wintertime. The farmers and their teams in the fields are choked with dust; the housewives, especially those who house-cleaned early are desperate; the dust sifts in everywhere."
With the dust, drought, voracious insects, and the desperate financial times it's no wonder times seemed so difficult. The Depression brought out the best in some, and the worst in others. Some turned to crime. On Nov. 1, 1933, highwaymen held up Oswego dentist Dr. Sheldon Bell and his wife on what is today U.S. Route 30 at Normantown, one of 11 motorists robbed that day.
Dairymen, desperate to raise prices they were getting for milk, staged a strike to keep shipments of milk and cream from non-members of the Pure Milk Association from getting to the Chicago market. In early January 1934, a truckload of cream driven by Norman Colby on its way from Yorkville to Chicago was stopped five miles east of Oswego by two carloads of men, and the cream dumped in the ditch. Insurance covered the loss, but Colby angrily refused the men's offer to help clean up the empty cream cans, according to the Record's account.
Eventually, things calmed down, but it took a while. Not until World War II did the Depression truly end. In comparison, today's financial problems are severe, but at least we don't have to worry about massive dust storms or highwaymen waylaying us. On the other hand, this financial crisis has likely not reached bottom yet, so maybe we ought to just wait and see.
Interested in more local history?
Visit http://historyonthefox.wordpress.com/
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