Through the 1930s, a woman named Caroline Henderson wrote a popular series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly called "Letters from the Dust Bowl." She had grown up in Iowa, gone to college at Mount Holyoke, moved to the far western part of the Oklahoma panhandle to begin life as a farmer, and married a man she first met when he worked digging a well on her farm.
For a while in the early 20th century, the Henderson family enjoyed good years. Here were Caroline and Will Henderson in their heyday on their 640-acre farm, standing in front of the house that Will Henderson built. It's the same house you see in the opening picture for this post.
Then things turned very bad for the country, and the high-plains farming region, and the Henderson family and their neighbors, during the combined economic and ecological disaster of the Depression and Dust Bowl years. That is what Caroline Henderson wrote about for the magazine, in installments that looked like this when they were first published (in a photo from our bound volumes, courtesy of my colleagues Jennifer Barnett and Nora Biette-Timmons):
Here is the sort of thing she wrote:
We have had several bad days of wind and dust. On the worst one recently, old sheets stretched over door and window openings, and sprayed with kerosene, quickly became black and helped a little to keep down the irritating dust in our living rooms. Nothing that you see or hear or read will be likely to exaggerate the physical discomfort or material losses due to these storms.
Less emphasis is usually given to the mental effect, the confusion of mind resulting from the overthrow of all plans for improvement or normal farm work, and the difficulty of making other plans, even in a tentative way. To give just one specific example: the paint has been literally scoured from our buildings by the storms of this and previous years; we should by all means try to 'save the surface'; but who knows when we might safely undertake such a project?...
The prospects for a wheat crop in 1936 still remain extremely doubtful...
You can read some of her installments from the archives here.