Stories
One of the best and most important ways to learn about a moment in history is to listen to the voices of the people who experienced it first hand. Thanks to the Latah County Oral History Collection and the University of Idaho Library, we have the ability to hear the stories of those who lived in Potlatch and the surrounding regions during the Great Depression.
Disclaimer: these interviews have been clipped to only include information relevant to this topic. For full interviews, please visit the Latah County Oral History Collection
Arthur sundberg - Potlatch
In the fall of 1931, after multiple wage cuts, the Potlatch Lumber Mill was temporarily closed due to dropping demands for lumber, putting almost all mill workers out of a job. However, Arthur Sundberg tells us that the company still did its best to take care of its employees, and times were not as bad in Potlatch as he believes many others in the country had it:
“And for a community, I believe that we fared better here than the average community anywhere in the whole country...There was a few that had a lot of initiative, you know, that would get out and try to improvise and then of course, there was a few like you'd find anyplace, I guess, that would just sit on their hands and cry and didn't know what was going to happen, but then they all weathered it anyway...“
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Listen to the full interview here.
Arthur sundberg - Potlatch
Here, Arthur relates how many residents in Potlatch planted gardens during the Depression to produce their own food sources, and how the company provided aid for starting these gardens, including providing plots of land and tools. Arthur also explains that gardening was a somewhat cooperative effort; many people pitched in for expenses and labored together to produce what they needed.
"And of course, this piece of ground, each one would draw his own plot as to the ground he wanted to work. But then as far as working the ground was concerned, why we all went together and shared the cost of working it up. But each one of us then planted their own garden and cultivated and harvested our own garden. So that helped a whole lot.”
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Listen to the full interview here.
Ida Soncarty with Baby Norman - 1930
Ella May Benge - Hatters Creek
(Pardon the background voices) Ella May describes a Christmas during the Depression when they had no money for special gifts or Christmas dinner. She bought her daughters a 50 cent doll and made doll clothes for it herself, and her daughters did not complain. She wanted to make a chocolate cake for the dinner, but had no cocoa, so she traded with a neighbor for some of her cocoa and scraped together the rest of the meal from what they already had.
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"And we just had the loveliest Christmas dinner that you ever saw. Just real nice! With nothing else, and I don't know, I think I had something that I give her in place of the cocoa. And that's the way it went."
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Listen to the full interview here.
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Burden School Children - 1936
Ida Soncarty in her garden - 1930
Emmet Utt
Emmet tells a story from his childhood about how he met a dairy man at the Mercantile who gave him advice he never forgot: "If you get a hold of an old cow's tail, hang on and she'll take you through hell and high water." This was the dairyman's philosophy for getting through the Depression. Emmet also shares how children in his time did not think about going through a Depression as long as they had 3 meals a day, but the parents worried where those meals would come from.
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Listen to the full interview here.
Laura Brackett Albright - Juliaetta
Laura describes the "bums" - very poor people traveling through the Palouse looking for better opportunities - and how she and her husband would give them food and shelter. She tells a story about a man whom she fed but would not allow inside her house, and how she found her 3-year-old daughter outside with him as he shared what little food he had with her.
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Later on, Laura was asked whether she and her family themselves struggled during the Depression:
"Yes, we did. And yet, we always had shelter. We always had food. We always had medical attention."
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Listen to the full interview here.
The Rohn Family - 1930