The 1930s were some of the driest years in American history.
A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935.
Photo credit: George E. Marsh
The early European explorers thought the Great Plains was unsuitable for agriculture.
The land is semi-arid and is prone to extended drought, alternating with periods of unusual wetness.
But the federal government was eager to see the land settled and cultivated.
These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.
Farmers ploughed through the land eliminating the native grasses that held the fine soil in place.
“People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep.
It is becoming Real.”
The term dust bowl was coined by Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press.
The shelterbelt wasnt a continuous wall of trees, but rather short stretches protecting individual farmlands.
By 1942, there was more than thirty thousand shelterbelts across the Plains.
To this day it remains the largest and most-focused effort of the US government to address an environmental problem.
Now many of the shelterbelts are either gone or no longer provide the benefits that they used to.
Some fear that the loss of these trees might lead to another crippling dust storm in the future.
Buried machinery in a barn lot; Dallas, South Dakota, May 1936.
A farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.
Photo credit: Arthur Rothstein.
The huge Black Sunday storm strikes the Church of God in Ulysses, Kansas, 1935.
Lakin, Kansas, 1935.
Photo credit: Green Family Collection
An abandoned Dust Bowl ghost town in South Dakota.
Photo credit:Paul Williams/Flickr
Sign for “Nation’s First Shelterbelt” located near Willow, Oklahoma.
Photo credit:Newsok.com
Sources:Wikipedia/America’s Library/Living History Farm/NPR/Wikipedia
