“Those were happier days than we knew then”
Farming was going well for the Hendersons in the summer of 1912 when Caroline wrote the below letter to Rose: “On the whole this has been the most favorable season we have seen here.” She goes on to describe the multitude of crops in the fields and in their garden, as well as the chickens and the turkeys (“132 young ones”) that she is raising. Events beginning in the fall of 1912 would change her tone as a prolonged dry spell began that September.
Caroline and Will’s only child, a daughter, Sarah Eleanor was two-years old at the time this letter was written. Caroline mentions to Rose that she has a neighbor who farmed while caring for her growing family of several children under the age of five. “I shouldn’t know how to do it,” she writes to Rose, “as perhaps the ‘higher education’ in which I suppose we shared, really does unfit one for domestic life. But those were happier days than we knew then and I am glad we had them and that you were there.”
“Continuing the long struggle here”
In the years that passed between Caroline’s hopeful 1912 letter to Rose, and the below December 1932 letter, her family experienced great hardship due to prolonged drought; that drought would soon lead to the Dust Bowl conditions. Approximately 17 inches of moisture were produced in their region in 1932, but most of it had fallen by the spring. In the period from 1933 through 1937, they would receive an average rainfall of only 12.97 inches.
Not knowing that worse was yet to come, Caroline here describes the harsh realities of her life, “[C]ut worms, hail, drought, and short crops, losses of small savings and investments and always the problem of trying to adjust expenses to the incredibly low prices that have prevailed throughout the entire year.” She notes how some of her neighbors have it much worse than she due to illnesses and the deaths of children; “One feels quite helpless in the face of such misery.”
And yet Caroline still expresses her desire to stay on her land. An avid reader, she notes that she has thoroughly enjoyed Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, that Rose had sent as a gift:
“It is rarely that one finds a person able to understand and sympathize with the primitive feeling of kinship with the earth–our common mother. … We are both near enough to pagas to have a good deal of that instinctive love for the earth. I think that has had much to do with our continuing the long struggle here.”
“The uncertainties of the weather”
“There has been no definite or reassuring change in weather conditions here,” Caroline writes to Rose in 1936. She goes on to describe the AAA program, or Agricultural Adjustment Act, “in reality the only thing that has saved the country side here from complete abandonment and the small towns from ruin…”. This program was an important part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, offering aid to farmers ranging from drought relief to agricultural price stabilization.
Caroline’s life was grim during these years as she experienced raging dust storms and summer temperatures as high as 120 degrees, and their farm produced no significant crops. Many families in the region left their land, but Caroline and Will continued to stay on.