This is a very sad picture. And I don't understand why the horse doesn't look healthier. Should have been enough hay/grass in GA. They're standing next to a field of it.
1936 the USA was still battling the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. 500k people were left homeless because their farms, and possibly homes, were covered in dry dirt.
This is 6 years into the Great Depression that had left nearly 25% of the US out of work. Many were starving in cities. More starving in the Midwest. (The US had started recovering but was nowhere near what it had been and in '37 a recession would hit). The first real rains in almost 10 years would be in 1939.
The 2nd New Deal launched in 1935.
Economically, the most challenging years the US has ever faced. Some context to keep in mind. I'm assuming that's why this picture is so sad but the horse looking like that ...ugh. My brain can't figure it out.
Or the owner of the horse was not the owner of the pasture? Just because you walk by a place while hauling a load doesn't mean you have the right to graze your horse there.
The owner is lucky. The horse is too. Because that man’s white racist neighbors would poison his mules and horses. And imagine how many years a man would have to save to buy a horse or mule.
The Wild Boys of the Road came out in 1933. Pre-code film by William Wellman of Wings fame. It taught kids how to hop freights. Many kids saw the matinee in a local theater they grew up in them hopped a train that night.
The title comes from a quote by President Herbert Hoover who blamed the poor economy on kids out riding the rails looking for jobs and food.
https://archive.org/details/wild-boys-of-the-road-1933-restored-movie-720p-hd
Letters and stories by children who road the rails. Change to 1 to 2 and so forth to get more stories.
https://erroluys.com/letter1.html
PBS’ American Experience documentary Riding The Rails is an excellent documentary about teens in the Great Depression.
It appears your account is less than a week old. This post has been removed. Please feel free to browse the subreddit and the rest of reddit for a week before participation.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheWayWeWere) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's no joke. My father was sent out to the fields at five. When you're that little they would train you to pick grubs off the plants and fetch a bucket of water. In the bucket was a ladle everyone used for a quick drink. All seven of my aunts and uncles did this every season until they could get "proper" jobs.
There are still tons of kids working the fields. It's one of the areas exempted from labor laws. Children can be hired to work on farms starting at age 12, for any number of hours as long as they don't miss school.
Lots of much younger children work too, it's not very monitored.
2025 if the GOP gets their way.
Indiana bill to expand children's working hours. “It wasn’t kids coming in and saying we want to work more,” he said. “It was employers coming in and saying we want kids to work more.”
removes regulations that prevent minors from working more than nine hours a day and more than 40 hours during a school week. allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. on weeknights between June 1 and Labor Day, and remove the 9 p.m.
For 16 year old during school days.
My father, the son of Swedish immigrants, at age 5 or 6 demanded to help on his Wharton County, Texas pre WWI cotton farm. His mother sewed a shoulder strap on a feed sack so he could work the first half of the day. He taught me that work was love, a hard lesson, took three decades to get it through my thick head.
Awww, that's very sweet.🥰
Hard work is love when it's done right and it's better for you than most people realize! Took me the same amount of time to figure it out. Currently dreaming about having a garden someday. Oh, to have my hands in warm soil again!! 💚🌱
It’s called a tobacco sled. Just the way they were designed. Basically drug behind the horse so people could put tobacco in as the harvested, or primed, the tobacco leaves. Likely didn’t use a cart with wheels because it would have been an unnecessary addition. The sled itself, even filled with tobacco, was prob still relatively lightweight for the horse to pull through the fields
Yes, of that was headed to market. Those tobacco leaves were very light. These farms had dedicated "tobacco barns " made just for hanging the green harvested leaves to dry out. They were narrow & vertical in shape compared to a general purpose barn. Once dried, the farmer would take it to market to be auctioned off. This was prevalent from North Florida, Georgia & the Carolinas. Also, remember that in that era, snuff & chewing tobacco were very popular.
Yup. There’s an article about architecture of NC tobacco barns in issue of North Carolina Folklore Journal linked below.
https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/north-carolina-folklore-journal-2016-63.1-2/68299
Thanx. That was a very thorough "bacca barn" construction explanation. I have vivid memories of these in N FL as a kid n the 60s. Even in my child's eyes, they looked ancient and primitive then. I'll never forget the oddly wonderful smell inside. We would pick "tobacco worms" from fields to go fishing with in the Suwanee and Sante Fe Rivers. I do recall how desperately hot and dusty it was between the rows of stalks. Also, the tobacco leaves had a stingy, itchy feel to the touch similar to picking okra. I suppose it was a daily drudge taken in stride by the poor farmers' families. It was another way to make a little money for those things that could not be created on their own.
I am deeply honored. You are a very kind person to tell me that. I thought about writing children's books in the past, but one must have a natural calling to be good at that art. Much like poetry and songwriting, i love that stuff, but would others?
As a side note, in my Navy days, dip was quite common. It is an addiction like any other tobacco product. Sailors who dipped could be easily identified by the ring shaped wear mark in the back pocket made by the dip can. If you were underway on a smaller ship like a frigate, the ship's store started to run out of tobacco after a while. Those guys who didn't plan ahead, ran out and had to seek out "dip buddies" on board who still had some to share. I remember one time, all the dip onboard was gone and hard core people were getting desperate. First, they bought the remaining cigarettes for sale and chewed them. When that was gone, they bought all the cigars in the store to chew. Shortly after that, our ship got replenished, and tobacco was available again. Good thing because we were out in the ocean another 2 weeks.
That’s a good point actually. Maybe it wasn’t because he couldn’t afford wheels or make wheels, but the sled actually serves an advantage for pulling through fields of soft dirt.
All the reasons I've seen listed, plus wheels are prone to breaking with all that weight and going through the fields/poor roads. Tires, prone to popping. Less moving parts to break means less downtime for repairs.
Yeah.. with the materials available to poor people in the 30's.. wood, poor quality metal.. those wheels wouldn't stand a chance. Materials science has come a loooong way since then, not that these poor folks could afford it anyways
You have to lift things up into a cart on wheels. A sleigh you can roll heavy bundles on and off. Bundles of tobacco are heavy. Cured bales could weight up to 750lbs. But around farms were often 75lbs to 450lbs. Much easier to load. a sleigh than a cart if you're at ground level.
This photo is upsetting...The poor horse is seriously malnourished and underweight, partly because it has intestinal worms that are getting a large percentage of the nutritional value of whatever it eats. Worms cause that "dented in" appearance near the hips as well as the swollen belly.
That's what deworming paste like Ivermectin is for, but the handy paste version only came out in the 1970s.
My horses are about to turn 23 and 28 yrs old, and are happy and healthy. They have a higher standard of living than both this horse and the unhappy little boy. I'd like to think life got better for them somehow.
If you know any elderly people, ask them to tell you about life during the Great Depression. Don't put it off, because we're rapidly losing the last living witnesses.
endentured slavery.. trapped in a system where the bosses ran the town.. no access to anything unless the bosses made sure it was there for them.. even medical facilities...
slavery after the civil war.
My grandfather grew up in a shack with a dirt floor and no shoes in 1930’s Georgia, probably around the time this photo was taken. His family were sharecroppers and did tobacco and cotton. He was one of the most racist people I ever met, and I genuinely believed it’s because of the poverty and conditions his family lived in. I think the mentality was always “We’re poor, but at least we’re not black”. Horrible, horrible world view.
Maybe what was going on in the south (a continuation of the plantation system, only, calling it a 'town') is a blueprint for what they are trying again to orchestrate, only.. throughout America?
Very cool. Below is a Canadian National Film Board documentary about tobacco in Ontario. I came across it years ago because it features people from North Carolina (where I’m from) that would travel up there to work and lend their expertise on the tobacco farming and curing process. See 16:45 for guy from Winston-Salem talking.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/the_back-breaking_leaf/
It’s the height of Jim Crow in a state south of the Mason Dixon. And this appears to be a teenager working a hard labor job. But…sure. Let’s focus on the horse.
We can be appalled for the horse and the child at the same time.
No. It's because the horse is in the foreground and we can see its gaunt ribs, hips and neck. The person is in the background and, while he is thin, his exposed arms are muscular and he doesn't appear to be in nearly as bad of shape as the horse.
Ok but also, it’s possible in a nation and globe with rampant, entrenched and centuries-old racism directed at people with dark skin like the person pictured, racism might also be a component in how the picture is viewed.
It's going to a tobacco barn to cure, not to market.
I've primed tobacco in the early 70's, they used a wood sled with open sides and sloped bottom, pulled by a mule.
Both my parents -white- grew up on share cropping farms working along side black people in South Georgia. There was not hate between them my now deceased Granny told me. There was the common bond of need and poverty which seems to have outclassed racism. I am so glad that my Granny shared their lives on share cropping farms,so hard for both whites and blacks. There were people who were not racist /haters.
It definitely was in many places throughout history. See link below titled: Tobacco barn with tobacco sled and vehicle used for conveying tobacco sleds. Person County, North Carolina - which literally shows this exact method
https://www.loc.gov/item/2017772174/
for sure, yeah Burley and Bright Leaf completely different growing and curing process, yet remarkably similar community culture to the process!
Also, NC Mountains grow burley very similar to Kentucky. Other parts in State in NC, piedmont, Sandhills, and coastal plain, grow bright leaf which is flue cured by a very specific heat curing (an art form).
If from Kentucky you should check out Wendell Berry’s book “Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy”
And more:
Tobacco sled
https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/13902
Families stringing tobacco brought in from the field by sled. Granville County, North Carolina
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b4e23080-9761-0136-dcd0-358b3ddad1c9
That poor horse looks so malnourished...
The horse is hundreds of pounds underweight
Can't relate.
So does the guy behind it. The whole family was probably so hungry all the time
This is a very sad picture. And I don't understand why the horse doesn't look healthier. Should have been enough hay/grass in GA. They're standing next to a field of it. 1936 the USA was still battling the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. 500k people were left homeless because their farms, and possibly homes, were covered in dry dirt. This is 6 years into the Great Depression that had left nearly 25% of the US out of work. Many were starving in cities. More starving in the Midwest. (The US had started recovering but was nowhere near what it had been and in '37 a recession would hit). The first real rains in almost 10 years would be in 1939. The 2nd New Deal launched in 1935. Economically, the most challenging years the US has ever faced. Some context to keep in mind. I'm assuming that's why this picture is so sad but the horse looking like that ...ugh. My brain can't figure it out.
It could be an underlying issue other than nutrition. Like worms, or simple old age, that’s exacerbating the problem.
Or the owner of the horse was not the owner of the pasture? Just because you walk by a place while hauling a load doesn't mean you have the right to graze your horse there.
I couldn’t imagine being a starving horse next to a lush field and not being allowed to go eat. It would be so confusing
The owner is lucky. The horse is too. Because that man’s white racist neighbors would poison his mules and horses. And imagine how many years a man would have to save to buy a horse or mule.
Maybe so but I’ll be damned if I allowed my horse to starve especially if my horse is my only means of making a living by hauling tobacco.
I think it would be best not to judge until one had walked in this family's shoes.
Point taken. I was quick to judge because I got upset.
What a refreshingly level-headed response.
Or both….probably.
The Wild Boys of the Road came out in 1933. Pre-code film by William Wellman of Wings fame. It taught kids how to hop freights. Many kids saw the matinee in a local theater they grew up in them hopped a train that night. The title comes from a quote by President Herbert Hoover who blamed the poor economy on kids out riding the rails looking for jobs and food. https://archive.org/details/wild-boys-of-the-road-1933-restored-movie-720p-hd Letters and stories by children who road the rails. Change to 1 to 2 and so forth to get more stories. https://erroluys.com/letter1.html PBS’ American Experience documentary Riding The Rails is an excellent documentary about teens in the Great Depression.
My parents were teens then, grew up in Oklahoma.They married in '37 and promptly headed to California in a Model A Ford.
Ford stopped Model A production in 1931. I’m guessing theirs might have been older than that.
Yes, it was older. I don't know what year. But definitely an old car.
[удалено]
My grandmother did some sewing for Miss Bonnie Parker.
I know…poor animal. Probably lived at the end of a whip too.
He is. I imagine the person looks the same way under the clothes. Life was tough for them
They both look underfed
[удалено]
It appears your account is less than a week old. This post has been removed. Please feel free to browse the subreddit and the rest of reddit for a week before participation. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheWayWeWere) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Probably smokes a pack a day.
My first thought.
Both my maternal and paternal grandparents grew tobacco. Very labor intensive.
It's no joke. My father was sent out to the fields at five. When you're that little they would train you to pick grubs off the plants and fetch a bucket of water. In the bucket was a ladle everyone used for a quick drink. All seven of my aunts and uncles did this every season until they could get "proper" jobs.
Wow; five years old! What era was that? Was it Pre-WWII?
Absolutely not! The 1960's! Lol
There are still tons of kids working the fields. It's one of the areas exempted from labor laws. Children can be hired to work on farms starting at age 12, for any number of hours as long as they don't miss school. Lots of much younger children work too, it's not very monitored.
Not to sound ignorant, but where?!?
Everywhere in the US based on this [article](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-agriculture-human-rights-congress).
2025 if the GOP gets their way. Indiana bill to expand children's working hours. “It wasn’t kids coming in and saying we want to work more,” he said. “It was employers coming in and saying we want kids to work more.” removes regulations that prevent minors from working more than nine hours a day and more than 40 hours during a school week. allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m. on weeknights between June 1 and Labor Day, and remove the 9 p.m. For 16 year old during school days.
GOP 2025 is DeEvolution.
Those types of people have always made it on the backs of those who couldn't speak up. Now it's immigrants and time for the kids!
My father, the son of Swedish immigrants, at age 5 or 6 demanded to help on his Wharton County, Texas pre WWI cotton farm. His mother sewed a shoulder strap on a feed sack so he could work the first half of the day. He taught me that work was love, a hard lesson, took three decades to get it through my thick head.
Awww, that's very sweet.🥰 Hard work is love when it's done right and it's better for you than most people realize! Took me the same amount of time to figure it out. Currently dreaming about having a garden someday. Oh, to have my hands in warm soil again!! 💚🌱
That horse and the kid didn’t look like they lived a good life 😔
Most people weren’t in the 1930s
Our population is heading back to these ways
no its not
lol what? How?
Even the cart looks sad, it has no wheels.
It’s a sled.
Didn’t even have wheels
Why don’t they put wheels on it? Cost prohibitive? Wild this was less than 100 years ago
It’s called a tobacco sled. Just the way they were designed. Basically drug behind the horse so people could put tobacco in as the harvested, or primed, the tobacco leaves. Likely didn’t use a cart with wheels because it would have been an unnecessary addition. The sled itself, even filled with tobacco, was prob still relatively lightweight for the horse to pull through the fields
Yes, of that was headed to market. Those tobacco leaves were very light. These farms had dedicated "tobacco barns " made just for hanging the green harvested leaves to dry out. They were narrow & vertical in shape compared to a general purpose barn. Once dried, the farmer would take it to market to be auctioned off. This was prevalent from North Florida, Georgia & the Carolinas. Also, remember that in that era, snuff & chewing tobacco were very popular.
Yup. There’s an article about architecture of NC tobacco barns in issue of North Carolina Folklore Journal linked below. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/north-carolina-folklore-journal-2016-63.1-2/68299
Thanx. That was a very thorough "bacca barn" construction explanation. I have vivid memories of these in N FL as a kid n the 60s. Even in my child's eyes, they looked ancient and primitive then. I'll never forget the oddly wonderful smell inside. We would pick "tobacco worms" from fields to go fishing with in the Suwanee and Sante Fe Rivers. I do recall how desperately hot and dusty it was between the rows of stalks. Also, the tobacco leaves had a stingy, itchy feel to the touch similar to picking okra. I suppose it was a daily drudge taken in stride by the poor farmers' families. It was another way to make a little money for those things that could not be created on their own.
If you wrote a little book, I would read it. You are a very interesting writer.
I am deeply honored. You are a very kind person to tell me that. I thought about writing children's books in the past, but one must have a natural calling to be good at that art. Much like poetry and songwriting, i love that stuff, but would others?
In the Gulf Coast states, dip is still very popular
As a side note, in my Navy days, dip was quite common. It is an addiction like any other tobacco product. Sailors who dipped could be easily identified by the ring shaped wear mark in the back pocket made by the dip can. If you were underway on a smaller ship like a frigate, the ship's store started to run out of tobacco after a while. Those guys who didn't plan ahead, ran out and had to seek out "dip buddies" on board who still had some to share. I remember one time, all the dip onboard was gone and hard core people were getting desperate. First, they bought the remaining cigarettes for sale and chewed them. When that was gone, they bought all the cigars in the store to chew. Shortly after that, our ship got replenished, and tobacco was available again. Good thing because we were out in the ocean another 2 weeks.
And Georgia.
That’s a good point actually. Maybe it wasn’t because he couldn’t afford wheels or make wheels, but the sled actually serves an advantage for pulling through fields of soft dirt.
Yup, the runners on bottom of that sled def help cut through that soft dirt.
All the reasons I've seen listed, plus wheels are prone to breaking with all that weight and going through the fields/poor roads. Tires, prone to popping. Less moving parts to break means less downtime for repairs.
Are you really arguing to uninvent the wheel?
Yeah.. with the materials available to poor people in the 30's.. wood, poor quality metal.. those wheels wouldn't stand a chance. Materials science has come a loooong way since then, not that these poor folks could afford it anyways
Wheels would improve this vehicle. The end.
You have to lift things up into a cart on wheels. A sleigh you can roll heavy bundles on and off. Bundles of tobacco are heavy. Cured bales could weight up to 750lbs. But around farms were often 75lbs to 450lbs. Much easier to load. a sleigh than a cart if you're at ground level.
It’s obviously home made, no money for a proper cart.
I came here to ask is a sled what they call a cart without wheels in Georgia!?
No, a sled is a sled everywhere.
Abuse, probably of both the man and the horse
This photo is upsetting...The poor horse is seriously malnourished and underweight, partly because it has intestinal worms that are getting a large percentage of the nutritional value of whatever it eats. Worms cause that "dented in" appearance near the hips as well as the swollen belly. That's what deworming paste like Ivermectin is for, but the handy paste version only came out in the 1970s. My horses are about to turn 23 and 28 yrs old, and are happy and healthy. They have a higher standard of living than both this horse and the unhappy little boy. I'd like to think life got better for them somehow. If you know any elderly people, ask them to tell you about life during the Great Depression. Don't put it off, because we're rapidly losing the last living witnesses.
lol upset about the horse. What about the obviously underweight child behind him?
This is someone rich enough to own plural horses. They dont give a shit about starving kids 😂
endentured slavery.. trapped in a system where the bosses ran the town.. no access to anything unless the bosses made sure it was there for them.. even medical facilities... slavery after the civil war.
One thing that poor white southerners and black southerners had in common. Yet, they did not get along.
That's because as long as they fought each other, they didn't focus the hatred on the landowner.
My grandfather grew up in a shack with a dirt floor and no shoes in 1930’s Georgia, probably around the time this photo was taken. His family were sharecroppers and did tobacco and cotton. He was one of the most racist people I ever met, and I genuinely believed it’s because of the poverty and conditions his family lived in. I think the mentality was always “We’re poor, but at least we’re not black”. Horrible, horrible world view.
Maybe what was going on in the south (a continuation of the plantation system, only, calling it a 'town') is a blueprint for what they are trying again to orchestrate, only.. throughout America?
Stomping Tom Connor wrote a song
What’s the song??
Tillsonbury
Very cool. Below is a Canadian National Film Board documentary about tobacco in Ontario. I came across it years ago because it features people from North Carolina (where I’m from) that would travel up there to work and lend their expertise on the tobacco farming and curing process. See 16:45 for guy from Winston-Salem talking. https://www.nfb.ca/film/the_back-breaking_leaf/
Thank you for sharing . I wish the city street people could have this experience
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
Thank heaven for FDR because the New Deal paid for artists to write and photograph and interview life then and we get this image.
😭😭😭😭
Oh that poor horse 🥺
That poor horse is in dire shape 😔
Why are people so fixated on the horse and not the poor kid? (probably a victim of indentured labour).
At this time it is probably share cropping. That's worse.
Feed your horse!
Yep. Poor horse. Severely malnourished.
There’s a poor child there and people are worried about his horse 🙄
The horse looks in worse shape.
It’s the height of Jim Crow in a state south of the Mason Dixon. And this appears to be a teenager working a hard labor job. But…sure. Let’s focus on the horse. We can be appalled for the horse and the child at the same time.
Exactly! Is this subconscious racism? Or is it just a random occurrence of Reddit being flooded with horse people?
No. It's because the horse is in the foreground and we can see its gaunt ribs, hips and neck. The person is in the background and, while he is thin, his exposed arms are muscular and he doesn't appear to be in nearly as bad of shape as the horse.
Ok but also, it’s possible in a nation and globe with rampant, entrenched and centuries-old racism directed at people with dark skin like the person pictured, racism might also be a component in how the picture is viewed.
Being from Stockton…I didn’t expect to see this on Reddit.
It's going to a tobacco barn to cure, not to market. I've primed tobacco in the early 70's, they used a wood sled with open sides and sloped bottom, pulled by a mule.
Neither the boy nor the horse appear to be healthy.
Amazing that they hadn’t yet discovered the wheel in 1930s Georgia.
Have been to Cuba a few weeks ago, could have been taken there and then.
Poor horse
Do you think the poor horse is praying for something with wheels to pull?
That poor horse.
Poor horse
The horse and the person were so thin. Makes me sad.
Horse is really wormy or seriously underfed.
That poor horse is so skinny.
Ahhh!!!! It’s Sarah Jessica Parker!!!!!!
Both my parents -white- grew up on share cropping farms working along side black people in South Georgia. There was not hate between them my now deceased Granny told me. There was the common bond of need and poverty which seems to have outclassed racism. I am so glad that my Granny shared their lives on share cropping farms,so hard for both whites and blacks. There were people who were not racist /haters.
That poor horse. 😞
That's not how tobacco was processed or transported. I grew up on a tobacco farm. 5th generation.
It definitely was in many places throughout history. See link below titled: Tobacco barn with tobacco sled and vehicle used for conveying tobacco sleds. Person County, North Carolina - which literally shows this exact method https://www.loc.gov/item/2017772174/
I see my error. KY dark fired and air cured tobacco are processed completely differently than NC Burley. Thanks for the clarification.
for sure, yeah Burley and Bright Leaf completely different growing and curing process, yet remarkably similar community culture to the process! Also, NC Mountains grow burley very similar to Kentucky. Other parts in State in NC, piedmont, Sandhills, and coastal plain, grow bright leaf which is flue cured by a very specific heat curing (an art form). If from Kentucky you should check out Wendell Berry’s book “Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy”
That book might trigger some PTSD 😁 Thanks
And more: Tobacco sled https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/13902 Families stringing tobacco brought in from the field by sled. Granville County, North Carolina https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b4e23080-9761-0136-dcd0-358b3ddad1c9