Remembering the Great Depression

Cheney, WA

My family consisted of my mother and father, my two younger brothers and my younger sister. My mother's baby sister came to live with us. My father's brother lived with us from time to time. Everybody did it in those days. Children had to go stay with grandparents and aunts and uncles simply because their parents couldn't afford to feed them and clothe them. The teachers weren't being paid because people weren't paying their taxes.

We lived in a three-room house, just a little country shack. My father had this dream to move up of course, so he had rented this bigger 8-room house. We all loved the house, so it was quite a blow to give that up. We went back to the little house. And then we were squatting on a place down the road.

I remember my father and grandparents trying so hard to save our ranch. The bank failed and new [managers] came in. They didn't know anything about farming and they wouldn't loan money. Our cattle were auctioned off by the bank. At the auction, some of our neighbors bought my pony and gave it back to us. They saved a cow for us that way. My mother would take her crate of eggs into the stores and she would bargain with them and that's how we got our food and our clothing.

I remember the morning grandmother went to her linen closet and took out a cigar box where she kept her chicken money. She counted it and parceled it out to my father and his brother and kept some for herself just to have grocery money. My family were stoic Scots. You didn't see them cry and carry on. But I remember so vividly when we got ready to go home, grandma just tousled my hair and said, "Thank you for coming with your daddy. This has been a hard day."

Ernestine McMillan Hilton is the author of the Great Depression memoir Once Upon a Green Meadow.